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Privacy-sensitive robotics is an emerging area of HRI research. Judgments about privacy would seem to be context-dependent, but none of the promising work on contextual "frames" has focused on privacy concerns. This work studies the impact of contextual "frames" on local users' privacy judgments in a home telepresence setting. Our methodology consists of using an online questionnaire to collect responses to animated videos of a telepresence robot after framing people with an introductory paragraph. The results of four studies indicate a large effect of manipulating the robot operator's identity between a stranger and a close confidante. It also appears that this framing effect persists throughout several videos. These findings serve to caution HRI researchers that a change in frame could cause their results to fail to replicate or generalize. We also recommend that robots be designed to encourage or discourage certain frames. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teleoperated robots can be used to provide medical care to patients in infectious disease outbreaks, alleviating workers from being in dangerous infectious zones longer than absolutely needed. Nevertheless, patients' reactions to this technology have not been tested. We test three hypotheses related to patients' comfort and trust of the operator and robot in a simulated Ebola Treatment Unit. Our findings suggest patients trust the robot teleoperator more when they can see the teleoperator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effective robot navigation in the presence of humans is hard. Not only do human obstacles move, they react to the movements of the robot according to instinct and social rules. In order to efficiently navigate around each other, both the robot and the human must move in a way that takes the other into account. Failure to do so can lead to a lowering of the perceived quality of the interaction and, more importantly, it can also delay one or both parties, causing them to be less efficient in whatever task they are trying to achieve. In this paper, we present a system capable of creating more efficient corridor navigation behaviors by manipulating existing navigation algorithms and introducing social cues from the robot to the human. We give the results of a user study, demonstrating the effectiveness of our system, and discuss how it can be applied more generally to a wide variety of situations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We present an interface that allows users to direct a mobile manipulation robot in tabletop pick-and-place tasks using only their head motions and a single button. The system uses an estimate of the user's head pose and a 3d world model maintained by the robot to determine where the user is pointing their head. We give the results of some preliminary evaluations of our system, which suggest that it is both intuitive and effective. We also describe an example trash-sorting application where the user directs a PR2 robot sort objects in to “trash” and “recycle” piles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We present a study that examines the efficiency and usability of three different interfaces for specifying which objects should be kept private (i.e., not visible) in an office environment. Our study context is a robot "janitor" system that has the ability to blur out specified objects from its video feed. One interface is a traditional point-and-click GUI on a computer monitor, while the other two operate in the real, physical space: users either place markers on the objects to indicate privacy or use a wand tool to point at them. This late-breaking report presents qualitative feedback from users for improving the interfaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on use of robots in homes and workplaces. It informs that lack of feedback makes manipulation of buttons and switches little difficult and autonomous software on robots perform lower actions that requires control actions. It mentions steps on use of robots which include identifying and localizing device, identifying and localizing control and performing manipulation of control. It also outlines the future use of robots.

Systems that give control of a mobile robot to a remote user raise privacy concerns about what the remote user can see and do through the robot. We aim to preserve some of that privacy by manipulating the video data that the remote user sees. Through two user studies, we explore the effectiveness of different video manipulation techniques at providing different types of privacy. We simultaneously examine task performance in the presence of privacy protection. In the first study, participants were asked to watch a video captured by a robot exploring an office environment and to complete a series of observational tasks under differing video manipulation conditions. Our results show that using manipulations of the video stream can lead to fewer privacy violations for different privacy types. Through a second user study, it was demonstrated that these privacy-protecting techniques were effective without diminishing the task performance of the remote user. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A variety of tasks with robots require directing the robot to interact with objects or locations in the world. While many interfaces currently exist for such interactions, in this paper, we focus on inputs which can be categorized as pointing. Specifically, we look at two ways of using the head as a pointing input: Google Glass, and a head pose estimation technique which uses RGBD data. While both of these input modalities have their own advantages and disadvantages, we evaluate them simply as pointing devices, looking at how the device characteristics affects pointing performance. This is evaluated in a user study in which participants perform a series of object designation tasks. We then use distance, time, and object size data to evaluate input devices using Fitts' Law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Robots for Humanity project aims to enable people with severe motor impairments to interact with their own bodies and their environment through the use of an assistive mobile manipulator, thereby improving their quality of life. Assistive mobile manipulators (AMMs) are mobile robots that physically manipulate the world in order to provide assistance to people with disabilities. They present an exciting frontier for assistive technology, as they can operate away from the user, have a large dexterous workspace (due to their mobility), and not directly encumber their users. The cornerstone of this project is an ongoing, interactive design process with a quadriplegic user, Henry Evans, and his wife and primary caregiver, Jane Evans. Henry has been enabled, through the use of a PR2 robot, to scratch his own face, shave, fetch a towel from his kitchen, and hand out Halloween candy to trick-ortreating children at a local mall. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]