This paper presents how extraction, representation and use of symbolic knowledge from real-world ... more This paper presents how extraction, representation and use of symbolic knowledge from real-world perception and human-robot verbal and non-verbal interaction can actually enable a grounded and shared model of the world that is suitable for later high-level tasks like dialogue understanding, sym-bolic task planning or reactive supervision. We show how the anchoring process itself fundamentally relies on both the situated and embodied nature of human-robot interactions. We present an implementation, including a specialized sym-bolic knowledge representation system based on Description Logics, and experiments on several robotic platforms that demonstrate these cognitive capabilities. Keywords human-robot interaction, symbolic knowledge anchoring, on-
Proceedings of the Combined Workshop on Spatial Language Understanding (, 2019
It is important, for human-robot interaction, to endow the robot with the knowledge necessary to ... more It is important, for human-robot interaction, to endow the robot with the knowledge necessary to understand human needs and to be able to respond to them. We present a formalized and unified representation for indoor environments using an ontology devised for a route description task in which a robot must provide explanations to a person. We show that this representation can be used to choose a route to explain to a human as well as to verbalize it using a route perspective. Based on ontology, this representation has a strong possibility of evolution to adapt to many other applications. With it, we get the semantics of the environment elements while keeping a description of the known connectivity of the environment. This representation and the illustration algorithms, to find and verbalize a route, have been tested in two environments of different scales.
Human-Robot Interaction challenges Artificial Intelligence in many regards: dynamic, partially un... more Human-Robot Interaction challenges Artificial Intelligence in many regards: dynamic, partially unknown environments that were not originally designed for robots; a broad variety of situations with rich semantics to understand and interpret; physical interactions with humans that requires fine, low-latency yet socially acceptable control strategies; natural and multi-modal communication which mandates common-sense knowledge and the representation of possibly divergent mental models. This article is an attempt to characterise these challenges and to exhibit a set of key decisional issues that need to be addressed for a cognitive robot to successfully share space and tasks with a human. We identify first the needed individual and collaborative cognitive skills: geometric reasoning and situation assessment based on perspective-taking and affordance analysis; acquisition and representation of knowledge models for multiple agents (humans and robots, with their specificities); situated, natural and multi-modal dialogue; human-aware task planning; human-robot joint task achievement. The article discusses each of these abilities, presents working implementations, and shows how they combine in a coherent and original deliberative architecture for human-robot interaction. Supported by experimental results, we eventually show how explicit knowledge management, both symbolic and geometric, proves to be instrumental to richer and more natural human-robot interactions by pushing for pervasive, human-level semantics within the robot's deliberative system.
Different notions of argument historically have played a central role in artificial intelligence ... more Different notions of argument historically have played a central role in artificial intelligence to model the diagnostic reasoning and decision making of medical experts. However, it was beyond the scope of that research to address information needs of the layperson. It was assumed that a medical expert, trained to interpret explanations produced by a system, would mediate between system and layperson. The goal of this symposium was to investigate the role of argumentation in future intelligent health-care systems, especially focusing on systems designed to interact directly with health-care consumers. The symposium brought together researchers from a variety of subfields of AI such as decision support, multiagent systems, computational models of natural argument, embodied conversational agents, and natural language text generation, in addition to researchers in fields providing empiri
2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2015
The overall performance of sampling-based motion planning algorithms strongly depends on the use ... more The overall performance of sampling-based motion planning algorithms strongly depends on the use of suitable sampling and connection strategies, as well as on the accuracy of the distance metric considered to select neighbor states. Defining appropriate strategies and metrics is particularly hard when considering robot dynamics, which is required to treat constrained motion planning problems for quadrotors. This paper presents an accurate but computationally fast quasimetric to determine the proximity of dynamic states of a quadrotor, and an incremental state-space sampling technique to avoid generating local trajectories that violate kinodynamic constraints. Results show that the integration of the proposed techniques in RRT-based and PRM-based algorithms can drastically decrease computing time, up to two orders of magnitude.
In this paper we present a robot supervision system designed to be able to execute collaborative ... more In this paper we present a robot supervision system designed to be able to execute collaborative tasks with humans in a flexible and robust way. Our system is designed to take into account the different preferences of the human partners, providing three operation modalities to interact with them. The robot is able to assume a leader role, planning and monitoring the execution of the task for itself and the human, to act as assistent of the human partner, following his orders, and also to adapt its plans to the human actions. We present several experiments that show that the robot can execute collaborative tasks with humans.
Natural Language Dialog Systems and Intelligent Assistants, 2015
Others can have a different perception of the world than ours. Understanding this divergence is a... more Others can have a different perception of the world than ours. Understanding this divergence is an ability, known as perspective taking in developmental psychology, that humans exploit in daily social interactions. A recent trend in robotics aims at endowing robots with similar mental mechanisms. The goal then is to enable them to naturally and efficiently plan tasks and communicate about them. In this paper we address this challenge extending a state-of-the-art goal-oriented dialogue management framework, the Hidden Information State (HIS). The new version makes use of the robot's awareness of the users' belief in a reinforcement learning-based situated dialogue management optimisation procedure. Thus the proposed solution enables the system to cope with the communication ambiguities due to noisy channel but also with the possible misunderstandings due to some divergence among the beliefs of the robot and its interlocutor in a Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) context. We show the relevance of the approach by comparing different handcrafted and learnt dialogue policies with and without divergent belief reasoning in an in-house Pick-Place-Carry scenario by mean of user trials in a simulated 3D environment.
This paper deals with the software system design of robots that can replace or assist humans in i... more This paper deals with the software system design of robots that can replace or assist humans in intervention tasks in hazardous environments. We consider missions that include navigation from a site to another, execution of specific tasks, and transmission of data. Communication difficulties with a remote ground station (delays and bandwidth), as well as time constraints on the tasks make it necessary to endow such robots with a high level of autonomy in the execution of a well specified mission. However, it is today unrealistic to build completely autonomous (and useful) robots. This paper presents an approach to answer these requirements; it describes an on-board robot system architecture that enables the robot to interpret its mission according to the context, and to control and adapt in real time the execution of its actions.
2007 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2007
In military missions in hostile environments involving teams of UAVs flying in formation, it is i... more In military missions in hostile environments involving teams of UAVs flying in formation, it is important to get the maximum benefits of the auto-protection systems of each aircraft to enhance the global security and efficiency of the team. One way to achieve this is to select a proper configuration for the formation. In this paper, we present an approach to autonomously adapt the configuration of a formation and we focus on its evaluation within a realistic framework where each UAV is simulated independently and communicate through a network.
2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2006
In the immediate future, metrics related to safety and dependability have to be found in order to... more In the immediate future, metrics related to safety and dependability have to be found in order to successfully introduce robots in everyday environments. The crucial issues needed to tackle the problem of a safe and dependable physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) were addressed in the EURON Perspective Research Project PHRIDOM (Physical Human-Robot Interaction in Anthropic Domains), aimed at charting the new "territory" of pHRI. While there are certainly also "cognitive" issues involved, due to the human perception of the robot (and vice versa), and other objective metrics related to fault detection and isolation, the discussion in this paper will focus on the peculiar aspects of "physical" interaction with robots. In particular, safety and dependability will be the underlying evaluation criteria for mechanical design, actuation, and control architectures. Mechanical and control issues will be discussed with emphasis on techniques that provide safety in an intrinsic way or by means of control components.
2012 4th IEEE RAS & EMBS International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics (BioRob), 2012
In a typical Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) scenario, the robot needs to perform various tasks for... more In a typical Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) scenario, the robot needs to perform various tasks for the human, hence should take into account human oriented constraints. In this context it is not sufficient that the robot selects grasp and placement of the object from the stability point of view only. Motivated from human behavioral psychology, in this paper we emphasize on the mutually depended nature of grasp and placement selections, which is further constrained by the task, the environment and the human's perspective. We will explore essential human oriented constraints on grasp and placement selections and present a framework to incorporate them in synthesizing key configurations of planning basic interactive manipulation tasks.
With robotics hardware becoming more and more safe and compliant, robots are not far from enterin... more With robotics hardware becoming more and more safe and compliant, robots are not far from entering our homes. The robot, that will share the same environment with humans, will be expected to consider the geometry of the interaction and to perform intelligent space sharing. In this case, even the simplest tasks, e.g. handing over an object to a person, raise important questions such as: where the task should be achieved?; how to place the robot relatively to the human in order to ease the human action?; how to hand over an object?; and more generally, how to move in a relatively constrained environment in the presence of humans? In this paper we present an integrated motion synthesis framework from planning to execution that is es-The research leading to these results has been partially funded by the European Community's Seventh Framework Program with DEXMART project under grant agreement №216239, with CHRIS project under grant agreement №215805 and with ANR Psirob AMORCES project.
2010 5th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 2010
Humans constantly generate and solve ambiguities while interacting with each other in their every... more Humans constantly generate and solve ambiguities while interacting with each other in their every day activities. Hence, having a robot that is able to solve ambiguous situations is essential if we aim at achieving a fluent and acceptable humanrobot interaction. We propose a strategy that combines three mechanisms to clarify ambiguous situations generated by the human partner. We implemented our approach and successfully performed validation tests in several different situations both, in simulation and with the HRP-2 robot.
Many robotic projects use simulation as a faster and easier way to develop, evaluate and validate... more Many robotic projects use simulation as a faster and easier way to develop, evaluate and validate software components compared with on-board real world settings. In the human-robot interaction field, some recent works have attempted to integrate humans in the simulation loop. In this paper we investigate how such kind of robotic simulation software can be used to provide a dynamic and interactive environment to both collect a multimodal situated dialogue corpus and to perform an efficient reinforcement learning-based dialogue management optimisation procedure. Our proposition is illustrated by a preliminary experiment involving real users in a Pick-Place-Carry task for which encouraging results are obtained.
The 23rd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2014
In daily human interactions, spatial reasoning occupies an important place. In this paper we pres... more In daily human interactions, spatial reasoning occupies an important place. In this paper we present a situation assessment reasoner that generates relevant symbolic information from the geometry of the environment with respect to relations between objects and human capabilities. The role of SPARK (SPAtial Reasoning and Knowledge) component is to permanently maintain a state of the world in order to provide a basis for the robot to plan, to act, to react and to interact. More precisely, we describe here the way the system manages the hypotheses to be able to handle such knowledge in a flexible manner. Equipped with such capabilities, a robot that will interact with humans should be able to extract, compute or infer these relations and capabilities in order to communicate and interact efficiently in a natural way. To illustrate our work, we will explain how the robot is able to manage and update agents beliefs and pass Sally-Anne test. This work is part of a broader effort to develop a complete decisional framework for human-robot interactive task achievement.
2007 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2007
Robots' interaction with humans raises new issues for geometrical reasoning where the humans must... more Robots' interaction with humans raises new issues for geometrical reasoning where the humans must be taken explicitly into account. We claim that a human-aware motion system must not only elaborate safe robot motions, but also synthesize good, socially acceptable and legible movement. This paper focuses on a manipulation planner and a placement mechanism that take explicitly into account its human partners by reasoning about their accessibility, their vision field and their preferences. This planner is part of a human-aware motion and manipulation planning and control system that we aim to develop in order to achieve motion and manipulation tasks in presence or in synergy with humans.
Abstract—Nowadays, one important research area of robotics is the design,of machines,with,capabil... more Abstract—Nowadays, one important research area of robotics is the design,of machines,with,capabilities to interact with humans,or other robots. Service robots fall in this category,of machines,and,they need,a set of functions to accomplish,their tasks. Future autonomous,robots must,be capable,to work,and take decisions,in an,automatic,way. Such a system,must,be capable,to handle most common objects in a dynamic,human environment. The first problem,to solve in every manipulation,task is how,to
This paper presents how extraction, representation and use of symbolic knowledge from real-world ... more This paper presents how extraction, representation and use of symbolic knowledge from real-world perception and human-robot verbal and non-verbal interaction can actually enable a grounded and shared model of the world that is suitable for later high-level tasks like dialogue understanding, sym-bolic task planning or reactive supervision. We show how the anchoring process itself fundamentally relies on both the situated and embodied nature of human-robot interactions. We present an implementation, including a specialized sym-bolic knowledge representation system based on Description Logics, and experiments on several robotic platforms that demonstrate these cognitive capabilities. Keywords human-robot interaction, symbolic knowledge anchoring, on-
Proceedings of the Combined Workshop on Spatial Language Understanding (, 2019
It is important, for human-robot interaction, to endow the robot with the knowledge necessary to ... more It is important, for human-robot interaction, to endow the robot with the knowledge necessary to understand human needs and to be able to respond to them. We present a formalized and unified representation for indoor environments using an ontology devised for a route description task in which a robot must provide explanations to a person. We show that this representation can be used to choose a route to explain to a human as well as to verbalize it using a route perspective. Based on ontology, this representation has a strong possibility of evolution to adapt to many other applications. With it, we get the semantics of the environment elements while keeping a description of the known connectivity of the environment. This representation and the illustration algorithms, to find and verbalize a route, have been tested in two environments of different scales.
Human-Robot Interaction challenges Artificial Intelligence in many regards: dynamic, partially un... more Human-Robot Interaction challenges Artificial Intelligence in many regards: dynamic, partially unknown environments that were not originally designed for robots; a broad variety of situations with rich semantics to understand and interpret; physical interactions with humans that requires fine, low-latency yet socially acceptable control strategies; natural and multi-modal communication which mandates common-sense knowledge and the representation of possibly divergent mental models. This article is an attempt to characterise these challenges and to exhibit a set of key decisional issues that need to be addressed for a cognitive robot to successfully share space and tasks with a human. We identify first the needed individual and collaborative cognitive skills: geometric reasoning and situation assessment based on perspective-taking and affordance analysis; acquisition and representation of knowledge models for multiple agents (humans and robots, with their specificities); situated, natural and multi-modal dialogue; human-aware task planning; human-robot joint task achievement. The article discusses each of these abilities, presents working implementations, and shows how they combine in a coherent and original deliberative architecture for human-robot interaction. Supported by experimental results, we eventually show how explicit knowledge management, both symbolic and geometric, proves to be instrumental to richer and more natural human-robot interactions by pushing for pervasive, human-level semantics within the robot's deliberative system.
Different notions of argument historically have played a central role in artificial intelligence ... more Different notions of argument historically have played a central role in artificial intelligence to model the diagnostic reasoning and decision making of medical experts. However, it was beyond the scope of that research to address information needs of the layperson. It was assumed that a medical expert, trained to interpret explanations produced by a system, would mediate between system and layperson. The goal of this symposium was to investigate the role of argumentation in future intelligent health-care systems, especially focusing on systems designed to interact directly with health-care consumers. The symposium brought together researchers from a variety of subfields of AI such as decision support, multiagent systems, computational models of natural argument, embodied conversational agents, and natural language text generation, in addition to researchers in fields providing empiri
2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2015
The overall performance of sampling-based motion planning algorithms strongly depends on the use ... more The overall performance of sampling-based motion planning algorithms strongly depends on the use of suitable sampling and connection strategies, as well as on the accuracy of the distance metric considered to select neighbor states. Defining appropriate strategies and metrics is particularly hard when considering robot dynamics, which is required to treat constrained motion planning problems for quadrotors. This paper presents an accurate but computationally fast quasimetric to determine the proximity of dynamic states of a quadrotor, and an incremental state-space sampling technique to avoid generating local trajectories that violate kinodynamic constraints. Results show that the integration of the proposed techniques in RRT-based and PRM-based algorithms can drastically decrease computing time, up to two orders of magnitude.
In this paper we present a robot supervision system designed to be able to execute collaborative ... more In this paper we present a robot supervision system designed to be able to execute collaborative tasks with humans in a flexible and robust way. Our system is designed to take into account the different preferences of the human partners, providing three operation modalities to interact with them. The robot is able to assume a leader role, planning and monitoring the execution of the task for itself and the human, to act as assistent of the human partner, following his orders, and also to adapt its plans to the human actions. We present several experiments that show that the robot can execute collaborative tasks with humans.
Natural Language Dialog Systems and Intelligent Assistants, 2015
Others can have a different perception of the world than ours. Understanding this divergence is a... more Others can have a different perception of the world than ours. Understanding this divergence is an ability, known as perspective taking in developmental psychology, that humans exploit in daily social interactions. A recent trend in robotics aims at endowing robots with similar mental mechanisms. The goal then is to enable them to naturally and efficiently plan tasks and communicate about them. In this paper we address this challenge extending a state-of-the-art goal-oriented dialogue management framework, the Hidden Information State (HIS). The new version makes use of the robot's awareness of the users' belief in a reinforcement learning-based situated dialogue management optimisation procedure. Thus the proposed solution enables the system to cope with the communication ambiguities due to noisy channel but also with the possible misunderstandings due to some divergence among the beliefs of the robot and its interlocutor in a Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) context. We show the relevance of the approach by comparing different handcrafted and learnt dialogue policies with and without divergent belief reasoning in an in-house Pick-Place-Carry scenario by mean of user trials in a simulated 3D environment.
This paper deals with the software system design of robots that can replace or assist humans in i... more This paper deals with the software system design of robots that can replace or assist humans in intervention tasks in hazardous environments. We consider missions that include navigation from a site to another, execution of specific tasks, and transmission of data. Communication difficulties with a remote ground station (delays and bandwidth), as well as time constraints on the tasks make it necessary to endow such robots with a high level of autonomy in the execution of a well specified mission. However, it is today unrealistic to build completely autonomous (and useful) robots. This paper presents an approach to answer these requirements; it describes an on-board robot system architecture that enables the robot to interpret its mission according to the context, and to control and adapt in real time the execution of its actions.
2007 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2007
In military missions in hostile environments involving teams of UAVs flying in formation, it is i... more In military missions in hostile environments involving teams of UAVs flying in formation, it is important to get the maximum benefits of the auto-protection systems of each aircraft to enhance the global security and efficiency of the team. One way to achieve this is to select a proper configuration for the formation. In this paper, we present an approach to autonomously adapt the configuration of a formation and we focus on its evaluation within a realistic framework where each UAV is simulated independently and communicate through a network.
2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2006
In the immediate future, metrics related to safety and dependability have to be found in order to... more In the immediate future, metrics related to safety and dependability have to be found in order to successfully introduce robots in everyday environments. The crucial issues needed to tackle the problem of a safe and dependable physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) were addressed in the EURON Perspective Research Project PHRIDOM (Physical Human-Robot Interaction in Anthropic Domains), aimed at charting the new "territory" of pHRI. While there are certainly also "cognitive" issues involved, due to the human perception of the robot (and vice versa), and other objective metrics related to fault detection and isolation, the discussion in this paper will focus on the peculiar aspects of "physical" interaction with robots. In particular, safety and dependability will be the underlying evaluation criteria for mechanical design, actuation, and control architectures. Mechanical and control issues will be discussed with emphasis on techniques that provide safety in an intrinsic way or by means of control components.
2012 4th IEEE RAS & EMBS International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics (BioRob), 2012
In a typical Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) scenario, the robot needs to perform various tasks for... more In a typical Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) scenario, the robot needs to perform various tasks for the human, hence should take into account human oriented constraints. In this context it is not sufficient that the robot selects grasp and placement of the object from the stability point of view only. Motivated from human behavioral psychology, in this paper we emphasize on the mutually depended nature of grasp and placement selections, which is further constrained by the task, the environment and the human's perspective. We will explore essential human oriented constraints on grasp and placement selections and present a framework to incorporate them in synthesizing key configurations of planning basic interactive manipulation tasks.
With robotics hardware becoming more and more safe and compliant, robots are not far from enterin... more With robotics hardware becoming more and more safe and compliant, robots are not far from entering our homes. The robot, that will share the same environment with humans, will be expected to consider the geometry of the interaction and to perform intelligent space sharing. In this case, even the simplest tasks, e.g. handing over an object to a person, raise important questions such as: where the task should be achieved?; how to place the robot relatively to the human in order to ease the human action?; how to hand over an object?; and more generally, how to move in a relatively constrained environment in the presence of humans? In this paper we present an integrated motion synthesis framework from planning to execution that is es-The research leading to these results has been partially funded by the European Community's Seventh Framework Program with DEXMART project under grant agreement №216239, with CHRIS project under grant agreement №215805 and with ANR Psirob AMORCES project.
2010 5th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 2010
Humans constantly generate and solve ambiguities while interacting with each other in their every... more Humans constantly generate and solve ambiguities while interacting with each other in their every day activities. Hence, having a robot that is able to solve ambiguous situations is essential if we aim at achieving a fluent and acceptable humanrobot interaction. We propose a strategy that combines three mechanisms to clarify ambiguous situations generated by the human partner. We implemented our approach and successfully performed validation tests in several different situations both, in simulation and with the HRP-2 robot.
Many robotic projects use simulation as a faster and easier way to develop, evaluate and validate... more Many robotic projects use simulation as a faster and easier way to develop, evaluate and validate software components compared with on-board real world settings. In the human-robot interaction field, some recent works have attempted to integrate humans in the simulation loop. In this paper we investigate how such kind of robotic simulation software can be used to provide a dynamic and interactive environment to both collect a multimodal situated dialogue corpus and to perform an efficient reinforcement learning-based dialogue management optimisation procedure. Our proposition is illustrated by a preliminary experiment involving real users in a Pick-Place-Carry task for which encouraging results are obtained.
The 23rd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2014
In daily human interactions, spatial reasoning occupies an important place. In this paper we pres... more In daily human interactions, spatial reasoning occupies an important place. In this paper we present a situation assessment reasoner that generates relevant symbolic information from the geometry of the environment with respect to relations between objects and human capabilities. The role of SPARK (SPAtial Reasoning and Knowledge) component is to permanently maintain a state of the world in order to provide a basis for the robot to plan, to act, to react and to interact. More precisely, we describe here the way the system manages the hypotheses to be able to handle such knowledge in a flexible manner. Equipped with such capabilities, a robot that will interact with humans should be able to extract, compute or infer these relations and capabilities in order to communicate and interact efficiently in a natural way. To illustrate our work, we will explain how the robot is able to manage and update agents beliefs and pass Sally-Anne test. This work is part of a broader effort to develop a complete decisional framework for human-robot interactive task achievement.
2007 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2007
Robots' interaction with humans raises new issues for geometrical reasoning where the humans must... more Robots' interaction with humans raises new issues for geometrical reasoning where the humans must be taken explicitly into account. We claim that a human-aware motion system must not only elaborate safe robot motions, but also synthesize good, socially acceptable and legible movement. This paper focuses on a manipulation planner and a placement mechanism that take explicitly into account its human partners by reasoning about their accessibility, their vision field and their preferences. This planner is part of a human-aware motion and manipulation planning and control system that we aim to develop in order to achieve motion and manipulation tasks in presence or in synergy with humans.
Abstract—Nowadays, one important research area of robotics is the design,of machines,with,capabil... more Abstract—Nowadays, one important research area of robotics is the design,of machines,with,capabilities to interact with humans,or other robots. Service robots fall in this category,of machines,and,they need,a set of functions to accomplish,their tasks. Future autonomous,robots must,be capable,to work,and take decisions,in an,automatic,way. Such a system,must,be capable,to handle most common objects in a dynamic,human environment. The first problem,to solve in every manipulation,task is how,to
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Papers by Rachid Alami