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Faculty Candidate Talk
3/6/2014 11:00 am
CoRE Lecture Hall (Room 101)

Towards Multimodal Human-Robot Interaction: Algorithms, Applications and Systems

Junaed Sattar, University of British Columbia

Faculty Host: Dimitris Metaxas

Abstract

Robots are increasingly being used in diverse environments in a variety of tasks, including but not limited to exploration, search-and-rescue and rehabilitation, and also personal applications. For safe, reliable robot operations, close collaboration between humans and robots are of utmost importance, as are robust, intuitive and natural communication methods.

This talk will present an insight into research in sensory human-robot interaction, and present findings from quantitative and qualitative studies, and also from various robot field trials. My research looks at algorithms and interfaces for human-robot interaction and control for autonomous robots in arbitrary environments. In particular, I have investigated vision-based approaches for human-robot interaction, human-motion detection and robust tracking for human-robot collaborative missions, particularly in underwater explorations. Recent work has looked at a quantitative model of human-robot dialog incorporating task cost and communication uncertainty, with the goal of preventing robots from carrying out potentially dangerous and unsafe tasks unless confirmed by its human partner. A network of smart devices, sensors and robots contribute to a distributed model of task cost. This human-robot dialog framework has been evaluated on-board a number of different robotic platforms -- including the Aqua amphibious robot and the Willow Garage PR2 robot. Currently, under the umbrella of the CanWheel project, this mechanism is being evaluated for risk assessment in collaborative control of robotic wheelchairs by older, cognitively impaired adults.

Bio

Junaed is an FRQNT post-doctoral fellow in the Laboratory for Computational Intelligence at the Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, working under the supervision of Dr. James J. Little. He completed his PhD from McGill University 2012, pursuing research in mobile robotics and human-robot interaction working with Dr. Gregory Dudek at the McGill Mobile Robotics Lab at the School of Computer Science. He received the FRQNT (Quebec Research Funds in Natural Sciences and Engineering) Post-Doctoral Scholarship, and has been a recipient of the FRQNT Doctoral scholarship and PRECARN industrial scholarship during his doctoral studies. His research interests are in mobile robotics, computer vision, human-robot interaction, machine learning and software architectures for intelligent systems. He is also a member of the CanWheel project, investigating robotics application to improve mobility and interaction for powered wheelchairs.   

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/junaedsattar/videos