NSF East Asia and Pacific Summer Institute (EAPSI) for FY 2013 in Korea

Alunni Nicholas, Worcester MA

Investigators

Abstract

This action funds Nicholas Alunni of Worcester Polytechnic Institute to conduct a research project in Engineering during the summer of 2013 at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, South Korea. The project title is "Creating an Interactive User Interface for a Humanoid Robot used in Disaster Response." The host scientist is Jun Ho Oh. This project works to create a highly dynamic user interface that can be used on any robot, for any task, with minimal training required. Creating a fully immersive user interface is an important aspect of this. The majority of current user interfaces focus on portraying information through sight alone, negating 80% of the human senses. To successfully supervise any robot, maps need to be created to intuitively display information from the robot to more senses in its human counterpart, such as touch and audio. This project helps make robot supervision, not teleoperation, the new paradigm for human-robot interaction. This project uses the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Robotics Challenge (DRC) as a prototype application for the user interface. Their challenge is to create a humanoid robot capable of interacting with our world, not an idealistic one, in order to respond to a simulated nuclear power plant disaster. This challenge poses an incredibly hard problem to solve given the high complexity of a humanoid robot and current technological capabilities. This fellowship provides unlimited access to the HUBO humanoid robot in Korea that will be used for the challenge. Broader impacts of an EAPSI fellowship include providing the Fellow a first-hand research experience outside the U.S.; an introduction to the science, science policy, and scientific infrastructure of the respective location; and an orientation to the society, culture and language. These activities meet the NSF goal to educate for international collaborations early in the career of its scientists, engineers, and educators, thus ensuring a globally aware U.S. scientific workforce. Furthermore, this work will be released as open source software once it is completed, which will benefit the entire robotics community. The EAPSI experience and work will also be presented at the home institute, which will foster future international collaboration.