Tag: Human-robot interaction

July’s Research Presentation

Amr Ahmed / / Uncategorized

The monthly PGRs Research Presentations was held on Wed.  8th July, 2pm, Room MC3108.

This session we had the following presentations:

Title: “Facilitating Individualised Collaboration with Robots (FInCoR)“.

By: Peter Lightbody

Abstract: Enabling a robot to seamlessly collaborate with a human counterpart on a joint task requires not only the ability to identify human preferences, but also the capacity to act upon this information when planning and scheduling tasks. This presentation provides a review of the current state-of-the-art techniques used in human-robot collaboration; techniques which will be utilised to combine the detection of human preferences with real-time task scheduling. This system will thus allow the collaborator to subconsciously influence the planning and scheduling of the system, eventually creating a seamless and less disruptive collaboration experience. This review is followed by a brief overview of the subsequent stages of research, with a probabilistic model introduced to allow the robot to dynamically adapt to changes during the completion of a task.  

 

 

 

 

 

PGRs meeting and Research Presentations – March 2015

Amr Ahmed / / Uncategorized

The monthly PGRs Research Presentations was held on Wed. 11th March, 2pm, Room MC3108.

This session we had the following presentations:

Title: “Retinal Vascular Measurement“. Title:   “4D Lifelong Exploration of Dynamic Environments”

By: Francesco Caliva

By: Joao Santos
Abstract: Several studies have shown that systemic diseases affect blood vessels’ geometry. Retina is a window in the vascular system, thus fundus images can be adopted to diagnose or evaluate pathological conditions. Segmentation algorithms are not able to completely segment blood vessels. This failure results in a set of disconnected vascular segments. Reconstructing the whole network has crucial importance. At this aim, in this work, implicit neural cost functions have been adopted to evaluate how the segments can be joined. In this talk I will present my current and future work. Abstract:  We present a novel 4D lifelong exploration method for dynamic, human populated environments. In contrast to other exploration methods that model the environment as being static, our spatio-temporal exploration method creates and maintains a world model that not only represents the environment’s 3D structure, but also its dynamics over time.The predictive ability of the 4D spatio-temporal model allows the exploration method not only where, but also when to make environment observations.
To validate our method, a mobile robot was deployed over 5 days in an office environment, and the proposed method was compared against a static approach. The results show that through understanding of the environment dynamics, the spatio-temporal exploration algorithm could predict which locations were going to change at a specific time and used this knowledge to guide the robot. This allowed our spatio-temporal exploration method to gather more information that the exploration method that relied on a static environment model.

 

 

 

 

 

PGRs Research Presentations – November 2013

Amr Ahmed / / Uncategorized

The monthly PGRs Research Presentations was held on Wed. 13th November, 2pm, Room MC0025 (Ground floor).

This session we had the following presentations:

Title: “Shaping human-aware navigation and human-robot joint motion using long-term adaptation“. Title:   “Data Analysis of Agent-based Crowd Simultion”

By: Christian Dondrup

By: Qinbing Fu
Abstract:Enabling a mobile service robot to move in a human populated environment is not only a question of safety but also of predictability, consistency, team work efficiency, and the general feeling of comfort of the human. This leads to a form of human-robot joint motion and human-aware navigation which is supposed to be most pleasant for the people involved. There are currently many approaches of solving this issue but most of them are built on constraints and static learning methods and not on long-term learning through interaction. The main focus of this thesis is therefore the creation of novel approaches to shape a robots spatial behaviour ”on-the-fly” using long-term experiences from engagements in joint movements with lay users and trying to find and understand adaptation needs and thereby create a predictable, readable and consistent robot behaviour.This first presentation will focus on state-of-the-art methods of social and human-aware navigation and a first study conducted to find gestures indicating adaptation needs to improve the feeling of comfort of human interaction partners and the likabilaty of the robot itself. Abstract: This work is based on clustering and visualizing an agent-based crowd simulation data in an airport, using K-means, Gaussian Mixture Model and Hidden Markov Model. With the help of these models, we mainly aim to verify the feasibility of our approach to analyse agents’ behaviour in the airport.

 

 

 

The meeting started by welcoming the new PGRs arrived.

After presentations and Q/A sessions, the meeting continued with:

* Congratulations Talal Al-Bacha, for his new baby girl.

* Brief information on the “Students Representative” duties/responsibilities/benefits.

* Election of the PGRs Students Representatives: 2 nominations and 2 positions available (based on a Rep for each 25 PGR).

* Students Reps for this academic year are: Christian Dondrup  and  Touseef Qureshi.

* Discussion about potential activities (social, trips,…etc.)