Title: Social Robots
Abstract:
As robots become more ubiquitous in society, they will have to
learn to
interact with people in socially acceptable ways. For the past six
years,we have been developing techniques that enable robots to
behave according
to social conventions, both conversationally and spatially. The
techniquesinvolve explicit modeling of human behavior and social
conventions,probabilistic reasoning about situations and the
intentions of people, and
explicit representation of affect and mutual interaction. We have
developed several robots that embody these ideas, including GRACE,
a robot
that attended the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the
roboceptionist, a joint project with the School of Drama, and a
robot that
dances rhythmically with children. This talk will describe our
efforts in
this area, focusing on the techniques that we have developed and
highlighting the gap that still remains between the behavior of our
robotsand true social interaction.
Biography:
Reid Simmons is a Research Professor in the School of Computer
Science at
Carnegie Mellon University. He earned his B.A. degree in 1979 in
ComputerScience from SUNY at Buffalo, and his M.S. and Ph.D.
degrees from MIT in
1983 and 1988, respectively, in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
Since coming to Carnegie Mellon in 1988, Dr. Simmons' research has
focusedon developing self-reliant robots that can autonomously
operate over
extended periods of time in unknown, unstructured environments.
This work
involves issues of robot control architectures, probabilistic
planning and
reasoning, monitoring and fault detection, and robust indoor and
outdoornavigation. More recently, Dr. Simmons has focused on the
areas of
human-robot social interaction, coordination of multiple heterogeneous
robots, and formal verification of autonomous systems. Over the
years, he
has been involved in the development of over a dozen autonomous
robots.
