A Short Glossary of Terms and Concepts in Human-Robot Interaction and Robotics
To better foster the interdisciplinary nature of the workshop, we have prepared a short glossary of terms and concepts commonly discussed in the fields of Human-Robot Interaction and Robotics. Readers are encouraged to read more comprehensive survey papers / texts such as:
• Goodrich and Schultz, “Human-Robot Interaction: A Survey.” Foundations and Trends in Human-Computer Interaction, 1(3), 2007, pp 203-275.
• Siciliano and Khatib, Springer Handbook of Robotics. Springer, 2008.
• Dautenhahn, Kerstin,, Human-Robot Interaction. In: Soegaard, Mads and Dam, Rikke Friis (eds.). “The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed.”. The Interaction Design Foundation, 2014.
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Agent: “An agent is anything that can be viewed as perceiving its environment through sensors and acting upon the environment through effectors.”
Anthropomorphism: “The behaviour of attributing humanlike properties and mental states to nonhuman agents and objects.”
Artificial intelligence (AI): “The field of artificial intelligence attempts to understand intelligent entities… But unlike philosophy and psychology, which are also concerned with intelligence, AI strives to build intelligent entities as well as understand them.” There is Strong AI (e.g., trying to fully simulate the human brain), and Weak AI (e.g., trying to simulate one part of the human brain, such as color vision). In 2015, most mainstream roboticists fall in the Weak AI camp, as Strong AI is seen to be a non-computable problem. (More theory on the computability challenges is available here).
Artificial moral agent: “An [artificial moral agent] AMA is an [artificial agent] AA guided by norms, which we as human beings consider to have a moral content… Agents may be guided by a set of moral norms, which the agent itself may not change, or they are capable of creating and modifying rules by themselves.”
Autonomy Spectrum / Autonomy Scale: In robotics, we often discuss a robot’s control in terms of a spectrum. Robots can be fully controlled by a human (teleoperated), fully autonomous (doing all tasks on its own), and anywhere in-between. Many HRI applications involve adjustable autonomy, where the robot’s autonomy can change depending on the situation.
Bystander Role (interaction roles): “[A] bystander role is principally concerned with co-existing in the same environment as the robot… A bystander does not explicitly interact with a robot but needs some model of robot behavior to understand the consequences of the robot’s actions… The bystander has only a subset (sub A) of the actions available. She is not able to interact at the goal or intention level.”
Collaborative Robots (Cobots): “Cobots are a distinct approach to relieve humans from fatigue, stress, and injuries in manipulating heavy and/or awkward parts. Cobots presume a division of control between human and robot, with a robot perhaps supporting a payload and allowing a human to guide it, subject to constraint surfaces or virtual walls.”
Degrees of freedom (DOF): The number of movements a robot can make per motor per axis of rotation (roll, pitch, and yaw).
Human-Robot Interaction (HRI): “HRI is a field of study dedicated to understanding, designing, and evaluating robotic systems for use by or with humans… The HRI problem is to understand and shape the interactions between one or more humans and one or more robots.”
Machine learning: “a set of methods that can automatically detect patterns in data, and then use the uncovered patterns to predict future data, or to perform other kinds of decision making under uncertainty”
The Media Equation: A theory proposed by Reeves and Nass that people’s treatment of computers is similar to that of people.
Operator interaction (interaction roles): “An operator is needed to work “inside” the robot; adjusting various parameters in the robot’s control mechanism to modify abnormal behavior; to change a given behavior to a more appropriate one; or to take over and tele-operate the robot… The operator is called upon to modify internal software or models when the robot behavior is not acceptable. The operator will deal mainly with interacting at an action level — actions allowed to the operator. ”
Peer interaction (interaction roles): “Teammates of the robots can give commands within the larger goal/ intentions… [The] use of the terms “peers” and “teammates” is not meant to suggest that humans and robots are equivalent but that each contributes skills to the team according to their ability. The ultimate control rests with the user –the team member or the supervisor.”
Physical HRI (pHRI): “In pHRI, humans and robots share the same workspace and come into contact with each other. Physical interaction may happen occasionally if normal operation is intended to be without contact, or on purpose if the operator is supposed to work in physical contact with the machine, exchanging forces and cooperating in action upon on the environment.”
Proximate interaction: “The humans and the robots are colocated (for example, service robots may be in the same room as humans).”
Remote interaction: “The human and the robot are not colocated and are separated spatially or even temporally (for example, the Mars Rovers are separated from earth both in space and time).”
Roboethics: “Roboethics is an applied ethics whose objective is to develop scientific/cultural/technical tools that can be shared by different social groups and beliefs. These tools aim to promote and encourage the development of Robotics for the advancement of human society and individuals, and to help preventing its misuse against humankind. According to the definition, roboethics is not the ethics of robots, nor any artificial ethics, but it is the human ethics of robots’ designers, manufacturers, and users.”
Robot: A physically embodied agent, able to sense and enact change in the physical world.
Shared control: “Control of the task is distributed between the human operator and the (autonomous) telerobot, such that each controls a subtask.”
Social signal: “Social signals and social behaviours are the expression of one’s attitude towards social situation and interplay, and they are manifested through a multiplicity of non-verbal behavioural cues including facial expressions, body postures and gestures, and vocal outbursts like laughter.”
Social signal processing (SSP): “Social signal processing is the new research and technological domain that aims at providing computers with the ability to sense and understand human social signals.”
Supervisory control: “… supervisory control implies that user’s commands and feedback occur at a very high level and the robot requires substantial intelligence and/or autonomy.”
Supervisor interaction (interaction roles): “A supervisor role could be characterized as monitoring and controlling the overall situation… [for example, in a multi-robot control scenario] robots would be monitored and the supervisor would be evaluating the given situation with respect to a goal that needs to be carried out.”
Telepresent Robot: A physically embodied system controlled by a remote operator. It provides audio/video feedback, and affords the ability to sense and manipulate the remote environment.
Theory of mind (ToM): “Theory of mind refers to those social skills that allow humans to correctly attribute beliefs, goals, perceptions, feelings, and desires to the self and to others”
Uncanny Valley (UV): A theory proposed by Mori, which states that as robots become more humanlike, they are more familiar and likable, until “a point is reached at which subtle deviations from human norms cause them to look creepy.” While UV theory remains unproven, work by Saygin et. al suggest the effect is hypothesized to be related to prediction errors in the brain. Others hypothesize UV effects are temporary.
Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ): “WoZ refers to a person (usually the experimenter, or a confederate) remotely operating a robot, controlling any of a number of things, such as its movement, navigation, speech, gestures, etc. WoZ may involve any amount of control along the autonomy spectrum, from fully autonomous to fully tele-operated, as well as mixed initiative interaction”