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A semi-autonomous communication robot: a field trial at a train station

Published: 12 March 2008 Publication History

Abstract

This paper reports an initial field trial with a prototype of a semiautonomous communication robot at a train station. We developed an operator-requesting mechanism to achieve semiautonomous operation for a communication robot functioning in real environments. The operator-requesting mechanism autonomously detects situations that the robot cannot handle by itself; a human operator helps by assuming control of the robot.
This approach gives semi-autonomous robots the ability to function naturally with minimum human effort. Our system consists of a humanoid robot and ubiquitous sensors. The robot has such basic communicative behaviors as greeting and route guidance. The experimental results revealed that the operator-requesting mechanism correctly requested operator's help in 85% of the necessary situations; the operator only had to control 25% of the experiment time in the semi-autonomous mode with a robot system that successfully guided 68% of the passengers. At the same time, this trial provided the opportunity to gather user data for the further development of natural behaviors for such robots operating in real environments.

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cover image ACM Conferences
HRI '08: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE international conference on Human robot interaction
March 2008
402 pages
ISBN:9781605580173
DOI:10.1145/1349822
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 12 March 2008

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Author Tags

  1. field trial
  2. human-robot interaction
  3. operator-requesting mechanism
  4. semi-autonomous commutation robot

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HRI '08
HRI '08: International Conference on Human Robot Interaction
March 12 - 15, 2008
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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Overall Acceptance Rate 268 of 1,124 submissions, 24%

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