Award Winning Work at ECE/HKUST Improves Human-robot Collaboration
Award Winning Work at ECE/HKUST Improves Human-robot Collaboration
Researchers from the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and from Hanson Robotics have won a Best Paper Award for their work on improving human-robot collaboration by exploiting observations of human gaze behavior at the Gaze Meets Machine Learning Workshop held at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference held at New Orleans, Louisiana, USA in December 2022. The paper studied how robots can provide more effective guidance to humans performing hierarchical tasks. An example of a hierarchical task is cooking: a high-level goal like grilling a steak, can be decomposed into a sequence of sub-tasks, e.g. defrosting the steak, chopping an onion, etc., each of which can be further decomposed into smaller sub-tasks, e.g., opening the freezer, removing the steak, etc., and so on. When the human is unsure or not performing the task correctly, a robot observing the human can automatically step in to provide guidance. However, it is difficult to determine the correct level at which to provide guidance based on observations of the human's actions alone. The paper shows how additional observations of where the human is looking can be used to improve the quality of robot's guidance to the extent that it nearly matches a human's guidance. This work is a significant step towards more natural and fluid human-robot collaboration, which may enable human to undertake significantly more complex tasks and perform them more safely and effectively, than possible without guidance.
The paper, entitled "Intention Estimation via Gaze for Robot Guidance in Hierarchical Tasks" was co-authored by Yifan Shen, Xiaoyu Mo, Vytas Krisciunas, David Hanson and Bert Shi. Yifan and Xiaoyu are Ph.D. students at HKUST. Vytas is a researcher at Hanson Robotics. David is CEO of Hanson Robotics. Bert is Acting Dean of the School of Engineering and a Professor in ECE at HKUST. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) is a world-class research-intensive university that focuses on science, technology, and business as well as humanities and social science. Hanson Robotics is an AI and robotics company dedicated to creating socially intelligent machines that enrich the quality of our lives.
