In the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory (IRL) at Vanderbilt University we seek to develop service robots with a high level of social intelligence and interactivity. In order to achieve this goal, we have identified two main issues for research. The first issue is how to achieve a high level of interaction between the human and the robot. This has lead to the formulation of our philosophy of Human Directed Local Autonomy (HuDL), a guiding principle for research, design, and implementation of service robots. The motivation for integrating humans into a service robot system is to take advantage of human intelligence and skill. Human intelligence can be used to interpret robot sensor data, eliminating computationally expensive and possibly error-prone automated analyses. Human skill is a valuable resource for trajectory and path planning as well as for simplifying the search process. In this paper we present our plans for integrating humans into a service robot system. We present our parad...
Mitchell Wilkes, W. Anthony Alford, Robert T. Pack