Human-Robot Interaction

The field studying how people and robots communicate, collaborate, and safely share space.

Human-robot interaction (HRI) studies the interaction between people and robots, spanning robotics, AI, natural language processing, design, and psychology. The ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction has run since 2006 and is the field's main academic venue. Its concerns include how a robot understands human speech, gestures, and intent; how it communicates its own state and plans back to people; and how it stays safe while sharing close quarters with them. HRI is commonly split by whether physical contact is involved: physical human-robot interaction (pHRI), such as a person steadying a robot arm while moving something together, versus social interaction, such as dialogue, expression, and companionship. Once robots enter homes, malls, and factories, they spend most of their time dealing with ordinary people who know nothing about the technology, so how well HRI is done directly determines whether a robot can actually be put to use. It connects closely to human-robot collaboration, instruction following, teleoperation, and embodied safety.

ExampleA user tells a home robot, “hand me that glass of water,” pointing in its direction; the robot understands and hands the cup over securely — the speech understanding, gesture recognition, and safe handover involved are all HRI research topics.

Also called

HRI

Related

Human-Robot Collaboration · Physical Human-Robot Interaction · Human-Robot Handover · Instruction Following · Embodied Safety · Teleoperation

Sources

Human–robot interaction - Wikipedia