Illah Nourbakhsh - US grants

Large-scale coordination tasks are becoming increasingly important in hazardous, uncertain, and time-stressed environments such as rescue operations and disaster response. In such environments, human rescuers must rapidly make decisions while under stress and with incomplete and dynamic information, that may save or put lives at risk. The proposed multidisciplinary research is founded on three key advances/technical ideas. 1) Teams of Autonomous Agents: Cyber Agents, Robots and People (CARPs) are hybrid teams that consist of large number of these entities, distributed in space and time and varying in capability and role. (2) A cooperative control paradigm facilitates the sharing of a) common goals, b) initiatives for communication and action, c) responsibilities for coherent group activity, d) information on the environment, mission, and situation, and e) assistance to overcoming barriers for various members of CARP groups whether human, robot or cyber-agent. (3) The key challenges for team formation and coordination in large-scale, uncertain coordination domains include ad hoc interoperability across different agents, teams and organizations that are brought together "as is", and co-adaptation to each other and to changing priorities and roles within the team. The impact of having CARP technology successfully deployed will allow robots to advance beyond niche roles in a handful of industries; instead they will be integrated into the larger society of humans and information systems in the workplace. Emergency response teams are an early high-payoff test domain as robots can go places normally dangerous to humans, thus saving rescuers' and victims' lives.

Robotics and Computer Vision Program

ABSTRACT


Proposal #: 0329014
Title: Decision Theoretic Approaches to Human-Robot Social Interaction
PI: Nourbakhsh, Illah Reza
Carnegie Mellon University

Social rules govern patterns of movement and allow individuals to share a space without interfering with each other's goals. These social rules of movement are rich and complicated, being highly dependent on context and governing both spatial and temporal relationships. The research question at the heart of this project is: can robots utilize cues based on human behavior in deciding when and how to apply the correct rules for social interaction? There are two main components to this question: how to acquire or design the representations of these rules and cues, and how to use this information in a robot's decision-making process. We approach this as a planning problem because a social interaction requires a sequence of actions rather than a one-time, reactive choice. We intend to extend existing decision-theoretic planning methods to semi-Markov models, which can represent more complex relationships between time and state than first order Markov models.

This project has potential impact in the research fields of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics as well as impact on numerous modern applications. It can result in making robots more likely to be deployed in environments where their capacity to be embodied information providers is most useful (museum guides, receptionists, helpmates for the elderly, etc.). This project is also promoting education for underrepresented groups like women and minorities.

Spelman College proposes the ARTSI (Advancing Robotics Technology for Societal Impact) Alliance in collaboration with Florida A&M University, the University of the District of Columbia, Hampton University, Morgan State University, Norfolk State University, Winston-Salem State University, the University of Arkansas-Pine Bluff, Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Brown University, Duke University, the University of Alabama, the University of Washington, and the University of Pittsburgh. Seven of these partners are HBCUs and seven are Carnegie Research I institutions. Their collaboration joins the strengths of HBCUs in conducting outreach and education in a nurturing learning environment with those of the R1's for conducting world class research. The ARTSI Alliance will motivate students to pursue computer science careers by emphasizing the creativity and socially beneficial aspects robotics technology with hands-on projects, curriculum, and media. ARTSI activities will span the academic pipeline from K-12 through the faculty ranks. At the K-12 level, students will be recruited with community outreach using robotics and art, robotics road shows, and a robotics educational film online repository. At the undergraduate level, HBCU students will be exposed to new robotics curriculum, and they will be encouraged to pursue advanced training in graduate school through summer research experiences, collaborative, interdisciplinary robotics projects in the arts and health, instruction in technical film documentation, student virtual film festivals, annual robotics conferences, and instruction in entrepreneurship for computer science. At the faculty level, it will increase the number of HBCU faculty who educate students in robotics and involve students in robotics research by providing faculty mentoring, summer research experiences for underrepresented faculty at R1 robotics labs, robotics summer workshops, and development and dissemination of robotics educational material through a web-based portal. The Alliance will have industry partners, including Seagate, iRobot, Microsoft Research, and Juxtopia, as well as educational partners, including Florida-Georgia Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation and Computer Science Teachers Association.

Computer Science (31)

The "Using Robotic Techniques in Introductory Computer Science" project is continuing research on how robotics can positively impact the retention in introductory computing courses of both women and members of underrepresented groups.

Intellectual Merit: This project is developing, and systematically evaluating, the reference design, firmware programming, and curriculum modules, of a richly interactive robot for use in introductory computing courses. The richness of the multi-modal interaction possible using this robot is enabling a form of learning and engagement that is having a quantitatively positive impact on retention in introductory computing courses.

Broader Impacts: The interactive robotics approach is proving to be successful at motivating women and members of underrepresented groups to succeed in computing. Ultimately, greater diversity in computing will result in a more technologically literate and globally competitive citizenry.

This 10-week summer REU Site program is part of the Quality of Life Technology (QoLT) Engineering Research Center (ERC). The vision of the QoLT ERC is to transform the lives of people with reduced functional capabilities due to aging or disability through intelligent devices and systems. The QoLT ERC is a unique partnership between Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt), integrating CMU's strength in the design, implementation, and technology transfer of intelligent systems, and Pittsburgh's strength in health sciences and aging research.

The primary objectives of the QoLT REU program are to transform undergraduate students from dependent to independent thinkers, give them a sense of accomplishment and exposure to potential end-users, and provide experience on projects designed to address real-world problems with systems-level engineering efforts. Participants will be engaged in cross-disciplinary research in QoLT to gain an understanding of how to relate functions (physiological, physical, social and cognitive) to the design of intelligent devices and systems that aid and interact with people. The undergraduate students' educational experience will be enhanced by field trips to QoLT testbeds and seminars.
Recruitment efforts will be targeted to students who come from institutions with limited research opportunities, minorities and students with disabilities. The participants will conduct leading research that has direct effects on peoples' lives. This program has the potential to increase the number of undergraduates who are well-prepared for graduate studies and professional careers in QoLT.

Carnegie Mellon University proposes a project, called Robot Diaries, that aims to attract and engage a new group of middle school students in computing. With Robot Diaries, students use familiar materials along with motors, lights, and computation to design affective, programmable, tangible communication devices. They animate their creations with emotional expression in the context of collaborative storytelling. Robot Diaries motivates middle-school aged children to engage with technology as creators and authors rather than simply as consumers, and it increases students? confidence in their ability to be creative with technology. This proposal builds on three years of pilot Robot Diaries projects that included multiple rounds of participatory design with students and teachers, and a preliminary analysis of the impact of this program on learning and self-confidence. With this proposal, the audience for Robot Diaries will be significantly expanded ? with an emphasis on girls and underrepresented minorities ? through collaboration with the Pittsburgh public school system and schools in the suburban and rural regions of southwestern Pennsylvania. The project will create and deploy its new curriculum through co-design with local teachers.

Despite the significant advances in robotics research and development over the years, there are still no pervasive intelligent mobile robots coexisting with humans in daily environments. Among the many possible reasons as to why this is the case, this project addresses the challenge of an effective concrete interaction of mobile robots with humans, focusing on tasks which enable joint human and robot performance and require spatial interaction. The PI's vision is that project outcomes will make it possible to have multiple robots in, say, an office building available for different navigational and informational tasks, including accompanying daylong visitors through their schedule of meetings, giving tours to occasional visitors, fetching objects for and taking them to people in offices, and delivering the daily mail. To achieve this goal, she plans to transform the state of the art in robot technology for social service robotics, by introducing a novel symbiotic human-robot and robot-robot interaction paradigm that allows robots to help and be helped by humans and each other. A robot will ask humans for assistance based on self awareness of its own limitations and a utility analysis of the estimated cost and benefits of the assistance. The PI and her team will develop and evaluate a robot platform-independent and building-independent problem environment representation, along with algorithms for incremental map learning, localization and navigation, and asynchronous (multi-robot) task partitioning and planning under uncertainty with a utility analysis that includes human availability for robot helping. They will explore effective spatial interaction between mobile robots in spaces with humans, utilizing social conventions, so that people are not just obstacles from the robot's perspective. The robot science and development research will be seamlessly integrated with educational and outreach activities, as well as with principled evaluation which will include fielding a team of robots in campus buildings.

Broader Impacts: Aside from dramatically advancing the state of the art in robot technology, enabling multiple mobile robots to be part of the workspace of an office building environment will have significant educational impact relating both to robot technology and interaction with robots. Continuous, openly available robot presence in the computer science and robotics research spaces will change the nature of the relationship between researchers and their classroom research projects, by triggering synergistic collaborations and new, higher-risk experiments with lower setup cost. C Campus outreach tours will be transformed from a narrow view of the future of technology in laboratory settings to a sweeping exposure to the reality and implications of humans and robots coexisting throughout the built environment, significantly broadening inquiry and discussion about the role of interactive technology in our lives. Disseminated curricula incorporating low-cost mobile robots in the secondary school classroom will lift the robot-classroom relationship from one of build kits for very low-capability robots to one of high-level interaction design, industrial design, and discussions of human-robot relationships.

Hampton University, in collaboration with Carnegie-Mellon University, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, the University of the District of Columbia, Norfolk State University, Winston-Salem State University, Morgan State University, Jackson State University, Elizabeth City State University, Duke University, the University of Alabama Tuscaloosa, and the University of Michigan, proposes the ARTSI Alliance (Advancing Robotics Technology for Societal Impact). ARTSI is a consortium of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and major research universities (R1s) working together to increase African American participation in computer science, with a focus on robotics. This extension proposal will expand ARTSI to seventeen Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and roughly 10 major research universities (R1s). Hampton University is the new lead institution; Carnegie Mellon University remains the lead R1 school. The extension introduces three new initiatives that (1) improve the quality and uniformity of robotics instruction by developing robotics curriculum modules specific to the needs of HBCUs, (2) pilot a program to attract STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) students to HBCUs by offering robot programming activities in local high schools, and (3) pilot skill-building program for rising sophomores to better prepare them to become involved in robotics research. The extension also includes new collaborations with the Caribbean Center for Computing Excellence (a BPC Alliance in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

This partnership brings together the Robotics Institute (Carnegie Mellon University), two institutions experienced in educational research and teacher development (Marshall University and West Liberty University) and school districts in West Virginia (Mingo County Schools) and Pennsylvania (Allegheny Valley School District). The key innovation of this project in the focal area of Identifying and Cultivating Exceptional Talent is its incorporation of robotics into courses for middle school students in a non-competitive setting to identify and cultivate talent in "exceptional computational thinking" and "exceptional engineering design." The project utilizes the Arts & Bots program which enables teachers to introduce craft-based robotics projects to students in disciplines as varied as art, science, health, or English.

The intellectual merit of this work is the analysis of the role of creative technology in student engineering engagement and the identification of unrecognized creative STEM talent. This contributes to STEM talent theories on computational thinking and engineering design and refines working definitions of technology fluency. The broader impacts include the integration of creativity with technology, refined professional development materials for teachers to support STEM talent, and models for school district-wide deployment of curricular innovation.

By executing the project with pre-service educational partners, a pathway to scaling is built so that the program may spread across a widening footprint of school districts. Research and evaluation focus on student engagement, knowledge, and attitudes as well as teachers' abilities to identify and support student talent.