Seminar 2007 02 01 Human-Human Physical Interaction

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Special Robotics Seminar
Replicating Human-Human Physical Interaction

Date: Thursday, February 1, 2007
Time: 12:00pm
Place: Maryland 110 (Lunch will be served)

Speaker: Kyle B. Reed
Northwestern University
Title: Replicating Human-Human Physical Interaction
Presentation: PDF, not yet uploaded

Abstract

Machines might physically interact with humans more smoothly if we better understood the subtlety of human-human physical interaction. As robots are becoming commonplace, robots should be able to interact with humans by replicating implicit interactions found in two people physically cooperating. In this presentation, Kyle will discuss the joint action of two people cooperating on physical tasks. This research shows that two people working cooperatively on a physical task are faster than they are alone and will quickly negotiate an emergent strategy: typically subjects formed a temporal specialization such that one member commands the early parts of motion and the other the late parts. When specialization was programmed into a robotic partner, the subjects did not specialize and their performance was worse. The opposite was true when a perturbation force was applied - subjects working with a robotic partner simulating dyadic-contraction were more stable than two subjects working together.

Bio

Kyle is currently a PhD candidate at the Laboratory for Intelligent Mechanical Systems (LIMS), Northwestern University, where he is studying Human-Robot-Human interaction. He interned at Los Alamos National Lab where he helped program a simulation analyzing the effects of explosions on underground structures and analyzed finite element models of an explosion containment vessel. Kyle received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 2001. More information can be found at: www.KyleReed.com