“Trust-guided Autonomy for Human-robot Collaboration” by Ali Karimoddini
Abstract: Recent studies on Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) aim at leveraging the interactions of humans and robots from highly constrained laboratories to meaningful collaborations for real-world applications. As the robots are partial actors in an HRC, the degree of their roles and their acceptance to human co-workers depend upon their operation and performance to improve the joint performances in a workspace. In this talk, we briefly review the performance and trust development in HRC settings in which robots are equipped with a learning capability. We also will discuss a trust-aware HRC framework, in which the autonomy level of robots can be automatically adjusted based on the developed trust and the relative performance of robots and human operators. For this purpose, we employ a Reinforcement Learning (RL) mechanism guided by the human operator’s rewards in an initially unknown workspace. The developed HRC framework can adapt to changes in the workspace as well as changes in human operator reward (scaling and shifting) mechanism.
Bio: Ali Karimoddini is an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, North Carolina A&T State University. He is the Director of NCCAV Center of Excellence on Advanced Transportation Technology, the Deputy Director of the TECHLAV Center of Excellence in Autonomy, and the Director of the ACCESS Laboratory. He received his Bachelor of Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Amirkabir University of Technology in Iran in 2003 and Master of Science in Instrumentation and Automation Engineering from Petroleum University of Technology in Iran, in 2007. He then received his Ph.D. degree from the National University of Singapore in 2013. His research interests include development of solutions for testing, evaluation, analysis, control, and decision-making for multi-agent systems and their interactions with human operators as well as their applications to battlefield management, air traffic management, smart transportation systems, and smart agriculture.