Coördinating human-robot communication

As robots begin to emerge from the cloisters of industrial and military applications and enter the realms of coöperative partners for people, one of the most important facets of human-robot interaction (HRI) will be communication. This can not merely be summarized in terms of the ongoing development into unimodal communication mechanisms such as speech interfaces, which can apply to any technology. Robots will be able to communicate in physically copresent, "faceto-face" interactions across more concurrent modalities than any previous technology. Like many other technologies, these robots will change the way people work and live, yet we must strive to adapt robots to humans, rather than the reverse. This thesis therefore contributes mechanisms for facilitating and influencing human-robot communication, with an explicit focus on the most salient aspect that differentiates robots from other technologies: their bodies. In order to communicate effectively with humans, robots require supportive infrastructure beyond the communications capabilities themselves, much as do the humans themselves. They need to be able to achieve basic common ground with their counterparts in order to ensure that accurate and efficient communication can occur at all.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Brööks, Andrëw G. (Brööks Zoz)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Cynthia L. Breazeal.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/38888

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/38888