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Recent advancements in robotics, including applications like self-driving cars, unmanned systems, and medical robots, have had a significant impact on the job market. On one hand, big robotics companies offer training programs based on the job requirements. However, these training programs may not be as beneficial as general robotics programs offered by universities or community colleges. On the other hand, community colleges and universities face challenges with required resources, especially qualified instructors, to offer students advanced robotics education. Furthermore, the diverse backgrounds of undergraduate students present additional challenges. Some students bring extensive industry experiences, while others are newcomers to the field. To address these challenges, we propose a student-centered personalized learning framework for robotics. This framework allows a general instructor to teach undergraduate-level robotics courses by breaking down course topics into smaller components with well-defined topic dependencies, structured as a graph. This modular approach enables students to choose their learning path, catering to their unique preferences and pace. Moreover, our framework's flexibility allows for easy customization of teaching materials to meet the specific needs of host institutions. In addition to teaching materials, a frequently-asked-questions document would be prepared for a general instructor. If students' robotics questions cannot be answered by the instructor, the answers to these questions may be included in this document. For questions not covered in this document, we can gather and address them through collaboration with the robotics community and course content creators. Our user study results demonstrate the promise of this method in delivering undergraduate-level robotics education tailored to individual learning outcomes and preferences., Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, 2024 ASEE Conference

The environments in which the collaboration of a robot would be the most helpful to a person are frequently uncontrolled and cluttered with many objects present. Legible robot arm motion is crucial in tasks like these in order to avoid possible collisions, improve the workflow and help ensure the safety of the person. Prior work in this area, however, focuses on solutions that are tested only in uncluttered environments and there are not many results taken from cluttered environments. In this research we present a measure for clutteredness based on an entropic measure of the environment, and a novel motion planner based on potential fields. Both our measures and the planner were tested in a cluttered environment meant to represent a more typical tool sorting task for which the person would collaborate with a robot. The in-person validation study with Baxter robots shows a significant improvement in legibility of our proposed legible motion planner compared to the current state-of-the-art legible motion planner in cluttered environments. Further, the results show a significant difference in the performance of the planners in cluttered and uncluttered environments, and the need to further explore legible motion in cluttered environments. We argue that the inconsistency of our results in cluttered environments with those obtained from uncluttered environments points out several important issues with the current research performed in the area of legible motion planners.

Our ongoing development and deployment of an online robotics education platform highlighted a gap in providing an interactive, feedback-rich learning environment essential for mastering programming concepts in robotics, which they were not getting with the traditional code-simulate-turn in workflow. Since teaching resources are limited, students would benefit from feedback in real-time to find and fix their mistakes in the programming assignments. To address these concerns, this paper will focus on creating a system for unit testing while integrating it into the course workflow. We facilitate this real-time feedback by including unit testing in the design of programming assignments so students can understand and fix their errors on their own and without the prior help of instructors/TAs serving as a bottleneck. In line with the framework's personalized student-centered approach, this method makes it easier for students to revise, and debug their programming work, encouraging hands-on learning. The course workflow updated to include unit tests will strengthen the learning environment and make it more interactive so that students can learn how to program robots in a self-guided fashion., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, IEEE FIE 2024

In an efficient and flexible human-robot collaborative work environment, a robot team member must be able to recognize both explicit requests and implied actions from human users. Identifying "what to do" in such cases requires an agent to have the ability to construct associations between objects, their actions, and the effect of actions on the environment. In this regard, semantic memory is being introduced to understand the explicit cues and their relationships with available objects and required skills to make "tea" and "sandwich". We have extended our previous hierarchical robot control architecture to add the capability to execute the most appropriate task based on both feedback from the user and the environmental context. To validate this system, two types of skills were implemented in the hierarchical task tree: 1) Tea making skills and 2) Sandwich making skills. During the conversation between the robot and the human, the robot was able to determine the hidden context using ontology and began to act accordingly. For instance, if the person says "I am thirsty" or "It is cold outside" the robot will start to perform the tea-making skill. In contrast, if the person says, "I am hungry" or "I need something to eat", the robot will make the sandwich. A humanoid robot Baxter was used for this experiment. We tested three scenarios with objects at different positions on the table for each skill. We observed that in all cases, the robot used only objects that were relevant to the skill., Comment: To Appear In International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Detroit, MI, USA, Oct 2023

Cloud computing is a concept introduced in the information technology era, with the main components being the grid, distributed, and valuable computing. The cloud is being developed continuously and, naturally, comes up with many challenges, one of which is scheduling. A schedule or timeline is a mechanism used to optimize the time for performing a duty or set of duties. A scheduling process is accountable for choosing the best resources for performing a duty. The main goal of a scheduling algorithm is to improve the efficiency and quality of the service while at the same time ensuring the acceptability and effectiveness of the targets. The task scheduling problem is one of the most important NP-hard issues in the cloud domain and, so far, many techniques have been proposed as solutions, including using genetic algorithms (GAs), particle swarm optimization, (PSO), and ant colony optimization (ACO). To address this problem, in this paper, one of the collective intelligence algorithms, called the Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA), has been expanded, improved, and applied. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been compared with that of GAs, PSO, continuous ACO, and the basic SSA. The results show that our algorithm has generally higher performance than the other algorithms. For example, compared to the basic SSA, the proposed method has an average reduction of approximately 21% in makespan., Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, 2023 IFIP International Internet of Things Conference. Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, Texas, USA

This paper presents a work-in-progress on a learn-ing system that will provide robotics students with a personalized learning environment. This addresses both the scarcity of skilled robotics instructors, particularly in community colleges and the expensive demand for training equipment. The study of robotics at the college level represents a wide range of interests, experiences, and aims. This project works to provide students the flexibility to adapt their learning to their own goals and prior experience. We are developing a system to enable robotics instruction through a web-based interface that is compatible with less expensive hardware. Therefore, the free distribution of teaching materials will empower educators. This project has the potential to increase the number of robotics courses offered at both two- and four-year schools and universities. The course materials are being designed with small units and a hierarchical dependency tree in mind; students will be able to customize their course of study based on the robotics skills they have already mastered. We present an evaluation of a five module mini-course in robotics. Students indicated that they had a positive experience with the online content. They also scored the experience highly on relatedness, mastery, and autonomy perspectives, demonstrating strong motivation potential for this approach., Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, conference

Vehicle pedestrian communication is extremely important when developing autonomy for an autonomous vehicle. Enabling bidirectional nonverbal communication between pedestrians and autonomous vehicles will lead to an improvement of pedestrians' safety in autonomous driving. If a pedestrian wants to communicate, the autonomous vehicle should provide feedback to the human about what it is about to do. The user study presented in this paper investigated several possible options for an external vehicle display for effective nonverbal communication between an autonomous vehicle and a human. The result of this study will guide the development of the feedback module in future studies, optimizing for public acceptance and trust in the autonomous vehicle's decision while being legible to the widest range of potential users. The results of this study show that participants prefer symbols over text, lights and road projection. Additionally, participants prefer the combination of symbols and text as interaction modes to be displayed if the autonomous vehicle is not driving. Further, the results show that the text interaction mode option "Safe to cross" should be used combined with the symbol interaction mode option that displays a symbol of a walking person. We plan to elaborate and focus on the selected interaction modes via Virtual Reality and in the real world in ongoing and future studies.

We present a context classification pipeline to allow a robot to change its navigation strategy based on the observed social scenario. Socially-Aware Navigation considers social behavior in order to improve navigation around people. Most of the existing research uses different techniques to incorporate social norms into robot path planning for a single context. Methods that work for hallway behavior might not work for approaching people, and so on. We developed a high-level decision-making subsystem, a model-based context classifier, and a multi-objective optimization-based local planner to achieve socially-aware trajectories for autonomously sensed contexts. Using a context classification system, the robot can select social objectives that are later used by Pareto Concavity Elimination Transformation (PaCcET) based local planner to generate safe, comfortable, and socially-appropriate trajectories for its environment. This was tested and validated in multiple environments on a Pioneer mobile robot platform; results show that the robot was able to select and account for social objectives related to navigation autonomously.

Hybrid simulation (HS) is a widely used structural testing method that combines a computational substructure with a numerical model for well-understood components and an experimental substructure for other parts of the structure that are physically tested. One challenge for fast HS or real-time HS (RTHS) is associated with the analytical substructures of relatively complex structures, which could have large number of degrees of freedoms (DOFs), for instance. These large DOFs computations could be hard to perform in real-time, even with the all current hardware capacities. In this study, a metamodeling technique is proposed to represent the structural dynamic behavior of the analytical substructure. A preliminary study is conducted where a one-bay one-story concentrically braced frame (CBF) is tested under earthquake loading by using a compact HS setup at the University of Nevada, Reno. The experimental setup allows for using a small-scale brace as the experimental substructure combined with a steel frame at the prototype full-scale for the analytical substructure. Two different machine learning algorithms are evaluated to provide a valid and useful metamodeling solution for analytical substructure. The metamodels are trained with the available data that is obtained from the pure analytical solution of the prototype steel frame. The two algorithms used for developing the metamodels are: (1) linear regression (LR) model, and (2) basic recurrent neural network (RNN). The metamodels are first validated against the pure analytical response of the structure. Next, RTHS experiments are conducted by using metamodels. RTHS test results using both LR and RNN models are evaluated, and the advantages and disadvantages of these models are discussed., Comment: 10 Pages, 12 Figures, IMAC 38i Conference

Mobile robots are increasingly populating homes, hospitals, shopping malls, factory floors, and other human environments. Human society has social norms that people mutually accept; obeying these norms is an essential signal that someone is participating socially with respect to the rest of the population. For robots to be socially compatible with humans, it is crucial for robots to obey these social norms. In prior work, we demonstrated a Socially-Aware Navigation (SAN) planner, based on Pareto Concavity Elimination Transformation (PaCcET), in a hallway scenario, optimizing two objectives so that the robot does not invade the personal space of people. This paper extends our PaCcET based SAN planner to multiple scenarios with more than two objectives. We modified the Robot Operating System's (ROS) navigation stack to include PaCcET in the local planning task. We show that our approach can accommodate multiple Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) scenarios. Using the proposed approach, we achieved successful HRI in multiple scenarios like hallway interactions, an art gallery, waiting in a queue, and interacting with a group. We implemented our method on a simulated PR2 robot in a 2D simulator (Stage) and a pioneer-3DX mobile robot in the real-world to validate all the scenarios. A comprehensive set of experiments shows that our approach can handle multiple interaction scenarios on both holonomic and non-holonomic robots; hence, it can be a viable option for a Unified Socially-Aware Navigation (USAN)., Comment: In Press at ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems

This paper presents the framework for a novel Unified Socially-Aware Navigation (USAN) architecture and explains its need in Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR) applications. Our approach emphasizes interpersonal distance and how spatial communication can be used to build a unified planner for a human-robot collaborative environment. Socially-Aware Navigation (SAN) is vital for helping humans to feel comfortable and safe around robots; HRI studies have shown the importance of SAN transcends safety and comfort. SAN plays a crucial role in perceived intelligence, sociability and social capacity of the robot, thereby increasing the acceptance of the robots in public places. Human environments are very dynamic and pose serious social challenges to robots intended for interactions with people. For the robots to cope with the changing dynamics of a situation, there is a need to infer intent and detect changes in the interaction context. SAN has gained immense interest in the social robotics community; to the best of our knowledge, however, there is no planner that can adapt to different interaction contexts spontaneously after autonomously sensing the context. Most of the recent efforts involve social path planning for a single context. In this work, we propose a novel approach for a unified architecture to SAN that can plan and execute trajectories for an autonomously sensed interaction context that are human-friendly. Our approach augments the navigation stack of the Robot Operating System (ROS) utilizing machine learning and optimization tools. We modified the ROS navigation stack using a machine learning-based context classifier and a PaCcET based local planner for us to achieve the goals of USAN. We discuss our preliminary results and concrete plans on putting the pieces together in achieving USAN., Comment: Presented at AI-HRI AAAI-FSS, 2018 (arXiv:1809.06606)

This paper proposes a distributed Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) algorithm for a team of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The proposed MARL algorithm allows UAVs to learn cooperatively to provide a full coverage of an unknown field of interest while minimizing the overlapping sections among their field of views. Two challenges in MARL for such a system are discussed in the paper: firstly, the complex dynamic of the joint-actions of the UAV team, that will be solved using game-theoretic correlated equilibrium, and secondly, the challenge in huge dimensional state space representation will be tackled with efficient function approximation techniques. We also provide our experimental results in detail with both simulation and physical implementation to show that the UAV team can successfully learn to accomplish the task.

Wild-land fire fighting is a hazardous job. A key task for firefighters is to observe the "fire front" to chart the progress of the fire and areas that will likely spread next. Lack of information of the fire front causes many accidents. Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to cover wildfire is promising because it can replace humans in hazardous fire tracking and significantly reduce operation costs. In this paper we propose a distributed control framework designed for a team of UAVs that can closely monitor a wildfire in open space, and precisely track its development. The UAV team, designed for flexible deployment, can effectively avoid in-flight collisions and cooperate well with neighbors. They can maintain a certain height level to the ground for safe flight above fire. Experimental results are conducted to demonstrate the capabilities of the UAV team in covering a spreading wildfire., Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1704.02630

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are commonly used for missions in unknown environments, where an exact mathematical model of the environment may not be available. This paper provides a framework for using reinforcement learning to allow the UAV to navigate successfully in such environments. We conducted our simulation and real implementation to show how the UAVs can successfully learn to navigate through an unknown environment. Technical aspects regarding to applying reinforcement learning algorithm to a UAV system and UAV flight control were also addressed. This will enable continuing research using a UAV with learning capabilities in more important applications, such as wildfire monitoring, or search and rescue missions.

Robots (and computers) are increasingly being used in scenarios where they interact socially with people. How people react to these agents is telling about the perceived animacy of such agents. Mistreatment of robots (or computers) by co-workers might provoke such telling reactions. The purpose of this study was to discover if people perceived mistreatment directed towards a robot any differently than toward a computer. This will provide some understanding of how people perceive robots in collaborative social settings. We conducted a between-subjects study with 80 participants. Participants worked cooperatively with either a robot or a computer which acted as the "recorder" for the group. A confederate either acted aggressively or neutrally towards the "recorder." We hypothesized that people would not socially accept mistreatment towards an agent that they felt was intelligent and similar to themselves; that participants would perceive the robot as more similar in appearance and emotional capability to themselves than a computer; and would observe more mistreatment. The final results supported our hypothesis; the participants observed mistreatment in the robot, but not the computer. Participants felt significantly more sympathetic towards the robot and also believed that it was much more emotionally capable., Comment: Submitted to International Journal of Social Robotics

Simulation environments for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can be very useful for prototyping user interfaces and training personnel that will operate UAVs in the real world. The realistic operation of such simulations will only enhance the value of such training. In this paper, we present the integration of a model-based waypoint navigation controller into the Reno Rescue Simulator for the purposes of providing a more realistic user interface in simulated environments. We also present potential uses for such simulations, even for real-world operation of UAVs., Comment: Proceedings of the ASME Dynamic Systems and Controls Conference, Tysons Corner, Virginia

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have gained much attention in recent years for both commercial and military applications. The progress in this field has gained much popularity and the research has encompassed various fields of scientific domain. Cyber securing a UAV communication has been one of the active research field since the attack on Predator UAV video stream hijacking in 2009. Since UAVs rely heavily on on-board autopilot to function, it is important to develop an autopilot system that is robust to possible cyber attacks. In this work, we present a biometric system to encrypt the UAV communication by generating a key which is derived from Beta component of the EEG signal of a user. We have developed a safety mechanism that would be activated in case the communication of the UAV from the ground control station gets attacked. This system has been validated on a commercial UAV under malicious attack conditions during which we implement a procedure where the UAV return safely to a "home" position.

Wildland fire fighting is a very dangerous job, and the lack of information of the fire front is one of main reasons that causes many accidents. Using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to cover wildfire is promising because it can replace human in hazardous fire tracking and save operation costs significantly. In this paper we propose a distributed control framework designed for a team of UAVs that can closely monitor a wildfire in open space, and precisely track its development. The UAV team, designed for flexible deployment, can effectively avoid in-flight collision as well as cooperate well with other neighbors. Experimental results are conducted to demonstrate the capabilites of the UAV team in covering a spreading wildfire.