Advances in Human‐Robot Interaction

Citation

Prassler (2005), "Advances in Human‐Robot Interaction", Industrial Robot, Vol. 32 No. 6, pp. 517-517. https://doi.org/10.1108/ir.2005.32.6.517.1

Over the last few decades, robots have developed from being very basic pick and place machines into autonomous devices that are able to perform a vast range of tasks based on computer programmes, sensors and actuators of varying degrees of intelligence, skill, power, and precision.

As the robot attempts to move from the highly constrained environment of an engineering research laboratory into the unstructured human world, the vast range of problems faced by the robot system includes the instruction, communication and interaction of the individual robots with not only the surrounding physical, material world, but also the fuzzy, ill‐defined organic world of the human being.

In this world, robots are expected to not only just perform tasks, but must also be able to find alternative ways of doing the same task and integrate human perception with robotic consistence, power and precision whilst operating within a common habitat.

The book is a report on the collaborative “MORPHA” project. The project has investigated how direct physical interaction between humans and robotic units may be used to train, instruct, teach and optimise robot activities. This represents a step along the road the robots and humans sharing a living space as well as physical collaboration on range of tasks.

The book is divided into seven chapters ranging from an opening chapter covering “Multi modal robot interfaces”, i.e. how humans can touch, show, guide or instruct robots passing through the problems associated with recognising patters of movement rather than objects and concluding with a substantive chapter on a range of specific applications for robots that possess the skills identified by the MORPHA project.

Several of the chapters are particularly interesting chapters and Chapter 3 covers the concept of PbD – programming by demonstration and investigates the motion matching and data interpretation necessary for a human to physically demonstrate a task to a robot so that the robot is able to perform this task from a “show and do” procedure.

Chapter 4 covers physical interaction, co‐existence and Chapter 5 addresses the problems of safety when humans and robots physically interact, mainly through studying the behaviour of a robotic “manufacturing assistant”.

The applications reported in Chapter 7 include the “manufacturing assistant” of Chapter 5 as well as a collaborative assembly robot, a robot bar assistant (yes, a drinks bar) and a range of domestic robots based upon the “Care‐O‐Bot”.

Although the book is part of the family of published works that originates from research projects and research conferences, it is not a simply a collection of published papers and has a well‐written introduction to each chapter that places the research in the context of possible applications and the state of current technical developments that are either available or are required to allow these applications to become a reality.

The books is well‐written and structured in manner that makes it possible to identify sections related to specific problems with out too much literary investigation. It provides the basis for further study into the future development of robotic activities in the human organic world in both the social and engineering domains.

The concept of bench marking these difficult tasks is introduced in Chapter 7 could form the basis for a whole area of investigation to provide a platform for developing quantitative assessment of the whole new sphere of robotic applications that are likely to develope in the near future.

Overall, a very useful book with an excellent collection of technical data placed in an applications oriented manner.