Designing for human-robot symbiosis

For the past ten years, the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory (IRL) at Vander bilt University has been developing service robots that interact naturally closely and safely with human beings. Two main issues for research have ari sen from this prior work. The first is how to achieve a high level of inter action between the human and robot. The result has been the philosophy of h uman directed local autonomy (HuDL), a guiding principle for research, desi gn, and implementation of service robots. The human-robot relationship we s eek to achieve is symbiotic in the sense that both the human and the robot work together to achieve goals, for example as aids to the elderly or disab led. The second issue is the general problem of system integration, with a specific focus on integrating humans into the service robotic system. This issue has led to the development of the intelligent Machine Architecture (I MA), a novel software architecture specifically designed to simplify the in tegration of the many diverse algorithms, sensors, and actuators necessary for intelligent interactive service robots.