The Robotics Institute

RI | Seminar | September 9

Robotics Institute Seminar, September 9
Time and Place | Seminar Abstract | Speaker Biography | Speaker Appointments

Educational Human-Robot Collaboration

Illah Nourbakhsh

CMU/NASA Ames

 

 

Time and Place

NSH 3305
Refreshments 2:15 pm
Talk 2:30 pm

Abstract

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Designing human-robot collaboration systems is an inherently multidisciplinary endeavor aimed at providing humans with rich, effective and satisfying interactions. Over the past eight years, my laboratory has focused on educational collaboration, wherein the purpose of the interaction is to provide measurable learning for humans through exploration and discovery.

 

We propose that the creation of a successful human-robot collaboration system requires innovation in several areas: robot morphology; robot behavior; social perception; interaction design; human cognitive models and evaluation of educational effectiveness.

 

Our iterative process for collaboration design extends evaluation techniques from the informal learning field together with underlying technical advances in robotics. This talk describes our research approach, technical contributions and experimental outcomes for three fielded robot systems that push on developing a generalizable approach to human-robot collaboration.

 

For the past seven months, I have been at NASA/Ames Research Center leading the robotics group, and I will conclude by describing the new NASA Exploration Vision's focus on human-robot collaboration, culminating in joint human-robotic exploration of the moon and Mars.

 

Speaker Biography

 

Illah R. Nourbakhsh is an Associate Professor of Robotics in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.  He is on leave for the 2004 calendar year and is at NASA/Ames Research Center serving as Robotics Group lead. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 1996. He is co-founder of the Toy Robots Initiative at The Robotics Institute. His current research projects include educational and social robotics, electric wheelchair sensing devices, believable robot personality, visual navigation and robot locomotion. His past research has included protein structure prediction under the GENOME project, software reuse, interleaving planning and execution and planning and scheduling algorithms. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory he was a member of the New Millenium Rapid Prototyping Team for the design of autonomous spacecraft. He is a founder and chief  scientist of Blue Pumpkin Software, Inc. Illah recently authored the MIT Press textbook, Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots.

 

Speaker Appointments

For appointments, please contact Illah Nourbakhsh.

Related Material

The Robotics Institute is part of the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University.