By Tim Sullivan, Spaulding Rehabilitation Network Communications
Many of us aren’t spending much time outside lately, but there are still many obstacles for us to navigate as we walk around: the edge of the coffee table, small children, the family dog. How do our brains adjust to changes in our walking strides? Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and the Motion Analysis Laboratory at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital used robots to try to answer that question, and discovered that mechanisms in both the cerebellum and the spinal cord determine how the nervous system responds to robot-induced changes in step length. The new study is published in the latest issue of Scientific Reports, and points the way toward improving robot-based physical rehabilitation programs for patients.
“Our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying locomotor adaptation is still limited. Specifically, how behavioral, functional, and physiological processes work in concert to achieve adaptation during locomotion has remained elusive to date,” said Paolo Bonato, Ph.D., an Associate Faculty member of the Wyss Institute and Director of the Spaulding Motion Analysis Lab who led the study. “Our goal is to create a better understanding of this process and hence develop more effective clinical interventions.”
For the study, the team used a robot to induce two opposite unilateral mechanical perturbations to human subjects as they were walking that affected their step length over multiple gait cycles. Electrical signals recorded from muscles were collected and analyzed to determine how muscle synergies (the activation of a group of muscles to create a specific movement) change in response to perturbation. The results revealed a combination of feedforward control signals coming from the cerebellum and feedback-driven control signals arising in the spinal cord during adaptation. The relative side-specific contributions of the two processes to motor-output adjustments, however, depended on which type of perturbation was delivered. Overall, the observations provide evidence that, in humans, both descending and afferent drives project onto the same spinal interneuronal networks that encode locomotor muscle synergies.
These results mirror previous observations from animal studies, strongly suggesting the presence of a defined population of spinal interneurons regulating muscle coordination that can be accessed by both cortical and afferent drives in humans. “Our team hopes to build on this work to develop new approaches to the design of robot-assisted gait rehabilitation procedures targeting specific descending- and afferent-driven responses in muscle synergies in the coming year,” said Bonato.
Intelligent systems, especially those with an embodied construct, are becoming pervasive in our society. From chatbots to rehabilitation robotics, from shopping agents to robot tutors, people are adopting these systems into their daily life activities. Alas, associated with this increased acceptance is a concern with the ethical ramifications as we start becoming more dependent on these devices [1]. Studies, including our own, suggest that people tend to trust, in some cases overtrusting, the decision-making capabilities of these systems [2]. For high-risk activities, such as in healthcare, when human judgment should still have priority at times, this propensity to overtrust becomes troubling [3]. Methods should thus be designed to examine when overtrust can occur, modelling the behavior for future scenarios and, if possible, introduce system behaviors in order to mitigate. In this talk, we will discuss a number of human-robot interaction studies conducted where we examined this phenomenon of overtrust, including healthcare-related scenarios with vulnerable populations, specifically children with disabilities.
Publication: HRI ’20: Proceedings of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction |March 2020 | Pages 1 |https://doi.org/10.1145/3319502.3374842
Intelligent systems, especially those with an embodied construct, are becoming pervasive in our society. From chatbots to rehabilitation robotics, from shopping agents to robot tutors, people are adopting these systems into their daily life activities. Alas, associated with this increased acceptance is a concern with the ethical ramifications as we start becoming more dependent on these devices [1]. Studies, including our own, suggest that people tend to trust, in some cases overtrusting, the decision-making capabilities of these systems [2]. For high-risk activities, such as in healthcare, when human judgment should still have priority at times, this propensity to overtrust becomes troubling [3]. Methods should thus be designed to examine when overtrust can occur, modelling the behavior for future scenarios and, if possible, introduce system behaviors in order to mitigate. In this talk, we will discuss a number of human-robot interaction studies conducted where we examined this phenomenon of overtrust, including healthcare-related scenarios with vulnerable populations, specifically children with disabilities.
Publication: HRI ’20: Proceedings of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction |March 2020 | Pages 1 |https://doi.org/10.1145/3319502.3374842
Robots could have a role to play in COVID-19, whether it’s automating laboratory research, helping with logistics, disinfecting hospitals, education, or allowing carers, colleagues or loved ones to connect using telepresence. Yet many of these solutions are still in development or early deployment. The hope is that accelerating these translations could make a difference.
This page aims to compile some resources for roboticists who are able to help, users who need robots for COVID-19 applications, and people who want to learn about robotics while on lockdown.
This is not an exhaustive resource page, and we will regularly be updating the content. Please send pointers to sabine.hauert@robohub.org. Check AIhub.org for a similar resource page related to AI. Read More
HRI2020 has already kicked off with workshops and the Industry Talks Session on April 3, however the first release of videos has only just gone online with the welcome from General Chairs Tony Belpaeme, ID Lab, University of Ghent and James Young, University of Manitoba.
There is also a welcome from the Program Chairs Hatice Gunes from University of Cambridge and Laurel Riek from University of San Diego, requesting that we all engage with the participants papers and videos.
The theme of this year’s conference is “Real World Human-Robot Interaction,” reflecting on recent trends in our community toward creating and deploying systems that can facilitate real-world, long-term interaction. This theme also reflects a new theme area we have introduced at HRI this year, “Reproducibility for Human Robot Interaction,” which is key to realizing this vision and helping further our scientific endeavors. This trend was also reflected across our other four theme areas, including “Human-Robot Interaction User Studies,” “Technical Advances in Human-Robot Interaction,” “Human-Robot Interaction Design,” and “Theory and Methods in Human-Robot Interaction.”
The conference attracted 279 full paper submissions from around the world, including Asia, Australia, the Middle East, North America, South America, and Europe. Each submission was overseen by a dedicated theme chair and reviewed by an expert group of program committee members, who worked together with the program chairs to define and apply review criteria appropriate to each of the five contribution types. All papers were reviewed by a strict double-blind review process, followed by a rebuttal period, and shepherding if deemed appropriate by the program committee. Ultimately the committee selected 66 papers (23.6%) for presentation as full papers at the conference. As the conference is jointly sponsored by ACM and IEEE, papers are archived in the ACM Digital Library and the IEEE Xplore.
Along with the full papers, the conference program and proceedings include Late Breaking Reports, Videos, Demos, a Student Design Competition, and an alt.HRI section. Out of 183 total submissions, 161 (88%) Late Breaking Reports (LBRs) were accepted and will be presented as posters at the conference. A full peer-review and meta-review process ensured that authors of LBR submissions received detailed feedback on their work. Nine short videos were accepted for presentation during a dedicated video session. The program also includes 12 demos of robot systems that participants will have an opportunity to interact with during the conference. We continue to include an alt.HRI session in this year’s program, consisting of 8 papers (selected out of 43 submissions, 19%) that push the boundaries of thought and practice in the field. We are also continuing the Student Design Competition with 11 contenders, to encourage student participation in the conference and enrich the program with design inspiration and insights developed by student teams. The conference will include 6 full-day and 6 half-day workshops on a wide array of topics, in addition to the selective Pioneers Workshop for burgeoning HRI students.
Keynote speakers will reflect the interdisciplinary nature and vigour of our community. Ayanna Howard, the Linda J. and Mark C. Smith Professor and Chair of the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, will talk about ‘Are We Trusting AI Too Much? Examining Human-Robot Interactions in the Real World’, Stephanie Dinkins, a transmedia artist who creates platforms for dialog about artificial intelligence (AI) as it intersects race, gender, aging, and our future histories, and Dr Lola Canamero, Reader in Adaptive Systems and Head of the Embodied Emotion, Cognition and (Inter-)Action Lab in the School of Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK, will talk about ‘Embodied Affect for Real-World HRI’.
The Industry Talks Session was held on April 3 and we are particularly grateful to the sponsors who have remained with HRI2020 as we transition into virtual. Karl Fezer from ARM, Chris Roberts from Cambridge Consultants, Ker-Jiun Wang from EXGWear and Tony Belpaeme from IDLab at University of Ghent were able to join me for the first Industry Talks Session at HRI 2020 – a very insightful discussion!
The HRI2020 proceedings are available from the ACM digital library.
Full papers:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3319502
Companion Proceedings (alt.HRI, Demonstrations, Late-Breaking Reports, Pioneers Workshop, Student Design Competitions, Video Presentations, Workshop Summaries):
https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3371382
The YouTube originals series “The Age of A.I.” was released in December 2019. If you haven’t already seen it now could be a good time to catch up – with much of the world in enforced or voluntary isolation many of us will be stuck at home with hours to fill. Sit back and marvel at the many incredible, and often heart-warming, applications of AI.
Episode 1 features researchers Mark Sagar, University of Auckland and Gil Weinberg, Georgia Tech. Mark works with will.i.am on a digital avatar and presents BabyX – a virtual animated baby that learns and reacts like a human baby. Gil makes music using AI and has teamed up other researchers at Georgia Tech to create smart prosthetics for amputees, combining ultrasound signals and machine learning.
Watch the other episodes:
Episode 2: Healed through A.I.
Episode 3: Using A.I. to build a better human
Episode 4: Love, art and stories: decoded
Episode 5: The ‘Space Architects’ of Mars
Episode 6: Will a robot take my job?
Episode 7: Saving the world one algorithm at a time
Episode 8: How A.I. is searching for Aliens
You can access the full series here.
The 15th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction – HRI 2020 – was meant to take place in the city of Cambridge UK. Instead it will be launching online today. You can follow latest happenings on twitter and youtube. Check here for a list of all the papers.
The theme of this year’s conference is “Real World Human-Robot Interaction,” reflecting on recent trends in the HRI community toward creating and deploying systems that can facilitate real-world, long-term interaction between robots and users.
Check back here, and the official HRI website, for new links and videos.
