Event

Techno-Sciences Inc. Robotics Seminar: Alan Schultz, "Human-Robot Interaction through Cognition"

Friday, February 17, 2012
12:00 p.m.
2460 A.V. Williams Building
Rebecca Hranj
rhranj@umd.edu

Techno-Sciences Inc. Robotics Seminar Series
Enabling Better Human-Robot Interaction through Cognition

Alan Schultz
Naval Research Laboratory

Host
S.K. Gupta

Abstract
As we move along the scale from teleoperation towards collaboration, human-robot interactions become more complex and require that the human and the robot share more common knowledge about the world and how things within the environment are related. At the collaborative level of interaction, the robot and human must exercise mixed initiative in solving a problem, each taking advantage of their unique skills, location, and perspective of the current situation. We believe that at this level and beyond, the robot will need representations and procedures that are similar to those used by humans, in order to collaborate successfully. Our working hypothesis is that a system that uses representations and processes similar to a person’s will be able to collaborate with a person better than a computational system that does not. I suggest reasons for this hypothesis and then describe empirical and computational evidence in several domains.

Biography
Alan C. Schultz is Director of the Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington D.C., in addition to being selected as the first Director of NRL’s new Laboratory for Autonomous Systems Research. He has twenty-six years of experience and over 100 publications in autonomous systems, robotics, human-robot interaction, and machine learning, and is responsible for establishing and running the robotics laboratory at NRL. Mr. Schultz was selected to teach at the first IEEE/RAS Summer School on Human-Robot Interaction, has been editor of several collections in multi-robot systems, and has chaired many conferences and workshops in robotics and human-robot interaction. Mr. Schultz received his M.S. in Computer Science from George Mason University in 1988. Mr. Schultz has been P.I. on numerous ONR, DARPA, NASA and DOE grants. He is the recipient of twenty Navy Special Achievement awards for significant contributions, and the Alan Berman Research Publication Award. His research is in the areas of human-robot interaction, autonomous systems, and adaptive systems.

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