How would you prefer to interact with a robot?
Say we are now at a point in society where robots are used for service at the shops and vendors. You are at a football match or concert and the drink & food vendors use robots to grab your item of choice. A bottle of water and a hotdog. How do you want them placed in your hands?
Deakin University IT student Thomas Koutsaplis is trying to figure that out by examining how humans prefer to interact with robots.
His ‘Handover project’ focuses on the factors that influence a person’s interaction with robots including the movements and sounds the robotic system makes.
“When people hand objects to each other, we often don’t need to think about the best way to do this,” he told Neos Kosmos.
“We mostly hand objects to each other however we’d prefer to receive the object.”
He said we grab objects depending on how they were handed to us, i.e. overhand, underhand, side, and the object.
“When it comes to handovers with robots, they unfortunately lack this intuition and understanding of human preferences.”
“There is also another variable that is introduced, which is what type of gripper the robot is using (how the robot holds the object).”
Koutsaplis’ research aims to test two objects – a ball and a rectangular item – which are handed to a user by different grippers: a robotic hand and a parallel gripper.
A vacuum gripper has also been tested.
After each handover, the participant is surveyed about their experience to assess how comfortable and natural each handover felt.
He has yet to run an official study but ran a demonstration at Deakin’s Open Day on August 25.
There Koutsaplis and his colleague Vinh ran a demo where a robot would detect when a water bottle was placed on the table and then would pick up the bottle and place it within arm’s reach of the person.
They were able to get some preliminary data and some feedback on the direction of the research.
“It made it clear that most people perceive robot-human handover as unnatural/unintuitive.”
Koutsaplis hopes that his research can make robot-human interactions feel more natural to people.
“It’s one thing to have a robot perform a task without human interaction, but there’s only so much they can do before they will need to interact much more with humans to expand their capabilities,” he said.
“Helping people with limited motor skills is one application of this research, but I hope there will be a day where anyone can have a comfortable and natural interaction with a robot.”
As for Koutsaplis’ overall opinion on AI and robots he said it is hard to formulate what he thinks of AI in general.
Optimistically he thinks AI may be the greatest tool for learning to ever exist, probably better than the internet itself.
But he is aware of the negatives like how it can lead to people becoming lazier, turning to AI to complete more and more tasks for them.
“However, I think this is similar to saying that the invention of the car made people lazier.”
“Yes, it probably did, but it also allowed us to travel further and faster than we ever had before, and there is still room for people to exercise and travel by walking or cycling in areas where a car might not be the most suitable mode of transport.”
“Similarly, AI should be used as a tool to enhance what humans are capable of creating, ‘a bicycle for the mind,’ as Steve Jobs once said about computers in a famous interview.
“I think the same can be said for robotics. They are just tools for us to use.”
