We are currently exploring how we can utilize instinctive human defense mechanisms (manifesting through perceived danger) to enable robots to interact safely with humans.

Maintaining the safety of humans is of paramount concern in the field of human-robot interaction. We employed a Research through Design (RtD) approach to explore better HRI safety mechanisms. We conducted a preliminary design study where we presented a group of designers various scenarios of different robotic platforms acting unsafely. Our findings indicate that participants mapped human responses to unsafe robotic interfaces, to natural human defensive behaviors in response to varying levels of threat stimuli. Based on preliminary findings, we suggest leveraging the instinctive human ability to react to dangerous situations as a fail-safe mechanism to the robot's own built-in safety methods.

Link to paper: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3177004

Creator: 
Fight-Or-Flight?
Monday, January 22, 2018 - 11:45am