“Trust and Risk in Human-Robot Collaboration: Modeling and Control Approaches” by Dr. Yue Wang
Abstract: Robots and autonomous systems are becoming an essential component that empowers economic and human possibility. Beyond performance centric design, human intent and intelligence may be encoded into robot motion planning and control to achieve safer and more reliable autonomy with higher user acceptance. Human-robot collaboration integrates the best part of human intelligence with the advantages of robotic systems. The talk will give an overview of current research projects in human-robot collaboration at the Interdisciplinary & Intelligent Research (I2R) lab in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Clemson University. We introduce the background and motivation of human robot trust. We will then present our works on computational trust modeling, robot control, and symbolic motion planning with humans-in-the-loop. Applications in the teleoperation of unmanned aerial vehicles and unmanned ground vehicles, collaborative assembly in manufacturing, and multi-robot bounding overwatch will be discussed. The I2R laboratory facilities and robot experiments will be demonstrated. The talk will conclude with a discussion about future research.
Bio: Yue Wang is the Warren H. Owen – Duke Energy Associate Professor of Engineering and the Director of the Intelligent and Interdisciplinary Research (I2R) Laboratory in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Clemson University. Her research interests are in cooperative control and decision-making for human-robot collaboration systems, symbolic robot motion planning with a human-in-the-loop, cyber-physical systems, and multi-robot systems. Her work has resulted in over 70 journal publications, peer-reviewed conference papers, and books, which are cited over 1,200 times (Google scholar) with an h-index of 18. Her research has been supported by NSF, AFOSR, ARO, ARC, NASA, ONR and industry. She has received an AFOSR YIP award, an NSF CAREER award, and the Air Force Summer Faculty Fellowship. She is an IEEE Senior Member and a Member of ASME. She currently serves as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine (RAM) and the ASME Journal of Autonomous Vehicles and Systems (JAVS). She is also a Technical Editor for the IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics. Her work has been featured in NSF Science360, ASEE First Bell and State News, SC EPSCoR/IDeA Research Focus, and Clemson University.