Human-robot interaction

Human-robot interaction has been a topic of both science fiction and academic speculation even before any robots existed. Because HRI depends on a knowledge of (sometimes natural) human communication, many aspects of HRI are continuations of human communications topics that are much older than robotics per se.

The origin of HRI as a discrete problem was stated by 20th-century author Isaac Asimov in 1941, in his novel I, Robot. He states the Three Laws of Robotics as,

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A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

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These three laws of robotics determine the idea of safe interaction. The closer the human and the robot get and the more intricate is the relationship the more the risk of a human being injured rises. Nowadays in advanced societies manufacturers employing robots solve this issue by not letting human and robot share the workspace at any time. This is achieved by the extensive use of safe zones and cages. Thus the presence of humans is completely forbidden in the robot workspace while it is working.

With the advances of artificial intelligence, the autonomous robots could eventually have more proactive behaviours, planning their motion in complex unknown environments. These new capabilities would have to keeping safety as a primer issue and as second efficiency. To allow this new generation of robot, research is being made on human detection, motion planning, scene reconstruction, intelligent behaviour through task planning.

The basic goal of HRI is to define a general human model that could lead to principles and algorithms allowing more natural and effective interaction between humans and robots. Research ranges from how humans work with remote, tele-operated unmanned vehicles to peer-to-peer collaboration with anthropomorphic robots.

Many in the field of HRI study how humans collaborate and interact and use those studies to motivate how robots should interact with humans.