Robotics Seminar: Holly Yanco (University of Massachusetts Lowell), Designing Robots for Humans
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Speaker
Abstract
All robots must be developed with humans in mind. Robots navigating remote environments often need assistance from human operators or supervisors, either in the form of teleoperation or interventions when the robot's autonomy is not able to handle the current situation. In co-located environments such as manufacturing floors, robots may need to explain their predicament to get assistance. As robots become more autonomous and ubiquitous, people will become bystanders to the systems, with little knowledge of the robot’s intent. This talk provides a retrospective of over two decades of research on the design of robot systems and evaluation of human-robot interaction. A wide variety of interaction modalities including multi-touch devices, virtual and augmented reality, and language, in applications ranging from assistive technology to telepresence to exoskeletons to human-in-the-loop planning for manipulation and mobility in remote environments will be presented.
Bio
Dr. Holly Yanco is a Distinguished University Professor and Chair of the Richard A. Miner School of Computer & Information Sciences, as well as Director of the New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation (NERVE) Center, all at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. For over 25 years, she has assembled and led a wide range of interdisciplinary collaborations to solve open problems in robotics and AI. Her research interests include human-robot interaction, evaluation metrics and methods for robot systems, and the use of robots in K-12 education to broaden participation in computer science. Yanco's research has been funded by the Federal government (NSF, including a CAREER Award and AI Institute, ARM Institute, ARO, DARPA, DOE-EM, ONR, NASA, NIST), the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (through the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative), and industry (Amazon Robotics, Google, Microsoft, and Verizon). Yanco is a member of the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council and the DARPA ISAT Study Group. She has a PhD and MS in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BA in Computer Science and Philosophy from Wellesley College. Yanco is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
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