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Robot to Human: “Trust Me”
Researchers in Europe explored how well rescuers worked with robots in disaster situations. They found the relationships a bit strained.
In a crisis control center, several teams of firefighters in Montelibretti, Italy, used laptops to guide a robotic ground vehicle into a smoke-filled highway tunnel. Inside, overturned motorcycles, errant cars, and spilled pallets impeded the robot’s progress. The rover, equipped with a video camera and autonomous navigation software, was capable of crawling through the wreckage unguided while humans monitored the video footage for accident victims. But most of the time the firefighters took manual control once the robot was a few meters into the tunnel.
Although the search was just an experiment, microphones recorded clear signs of stress during several tests of the scenario: The firefighter driving the rover spoke at a higher pitch, and members of some teams also interfered with one another’s radio transmissions. And while the human drivers may have improved the robot’s performance, they should have been more focused on the search for victims, says artificial-intelligence expert Geert-Jan Kruijff of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, in Saarbrücken, who consulted on the experiment. The drivers were micromanaging their robots.
The same thing has already happened in the real world: After the Fukushima nuclear power station’s meltdown in 2011, a human driver refused to use a ground robot’s autonomous navigation and managed to get the rover tangled up in its own network cable. At a disaster scene with lives on the line, human rescuers need to learn to trust their robotic teammates or they’ll have their own meltdowns, says Kruijff.
“We’ve done a lot of work on autonomy,” Kruijff says, referring to robots’ ability to navigate, “but if the user doesn’t use it, what good is it?” He figures that rescue robots will need to better understand their human teammates and communicate in a more sophisticated way.
The first step is to gather data to help figure out how to predict when human robot wranglers are overwhelmed. That’s not easy, Kruijff and his colleagues say, and the team is considering different ways a robot can measure stress and attention in its handler. Just as the robots build three-dimensional maps of the physical environments they explore, their software must also build real-time maps of the psychological bottlenecks their human partners face during a rescue mission. Certain things, such as voice-pitch changes, are easy to measure unobtrusively. But strapping cuffs on firefighters to measure their blood pressure or using saliva swabs to measure their cortisol levels would be more trouble than it’s worth.
The next step is to have the robot decide what and how best to communicate. A driver straining to interpret video of a rubble field might be less likely to ignore an audible warning about a nearby victim than a pop-up message on the screen, Kruijff suggests. His team, part of an international consortium that focuses on improving human-robot cooperation in dynamic environments (NIFTi), is considering various configurations of alerts.
Robots also need to better communicate their own abilities and intentions, says rescue robot researcher Robin Murphy of Texas A&M University, in College Station. At a chemical train wreck where her team tested an autonomous helicopter, a rescuer found that the robot bounced too much to take photographs when it first reached an assigned waypoint. The pilot’s attempts to compensate led to more bouncing. In their next iteration of the control software, she explains, they included an icon on the rescuer’s screen indicating when the helicopter’s autopilot was correcting for gusts of wind before settling into place.
Murphy says that one of the strengths of the NIFTi approach is that it has created a series of tests with working firefighters in Italy and Germany. “Too much of our work in robotics has been in the lab,” she says. “Rescue robotics...doesn’t lend itself to reductionism....You’ve got to be in the field with the users, see the robot as a joint cognitive system, and then find out what the scientific problems are.”
About the Author
The article “Robot to Human: ‘Trust Me’ ” was a long time coming. Following Laursen’s November 2010 Spectrum piece on “embodied cognition” in robots, a researcher told him about rescue robots’ emerging empathy for humans. Laursen, who has been reporting from Europe for six years, finally wrote this story after the researchers had analyzed the results of a series of new experiments.
Source: http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/robot-to-human-trust-me
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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