Plenary Talk
Friday August 22,
Prof. John Baillieul (Intelligent Mechatronics Laboratory Boston University)
"The Psychology of Human-Robot Interaction"


Abstract.
Japan has become a world leader in humanoid robotics, and every year, international conferences like SICE feature reports of remarkable new suites of human behaviors that have been convincingly simulated by machines. But as machines everywhere have become more capable of autonomous operation, there is an increasing awareness that the psychological dimensions of human relationships with intelligent machines must be better understood. A growing body of research has refocused attention from traditional human factors engineering to new domains in which principles and models of cognitive and social psychology are being applied to understand the interactions of humans and robots. A particular objective of this research has been the development of a fundamental understanding of how humans and autonomous machine agents can operate efficiently as teams to accomplish mission objectives and share in tasks in a way that the differing abilities of the humans and machines are used to best advantage.
Research funding agencies in the United States are taking an increasing interest in the operation of mixed teams of humans and robots. In part this interest has sprung from the U.S. government mandate that by 2015 a third of all deployed military vehicles must be autonomous. It is anticipated that future teams will feature significant changes in the decision-making roles of the robot and human team members. The background for the research that will be presented in this talk includes well known U.S. DoD research programs including the DARPA MICA program and the DARPA ISAT 2005 study entitled "Embedded Humans." In these programs, there was identified a paradigm shift from a supervisory role for humans operating semiautonomous systems to a more distributed role, involving humans both in supervisory roles at top levels of system hierarchies and also working in parity with automatons at execution levels-where resource allocations, task assignments, and execution are decided. This paradigm shift brought to the forefront the psychological aspects of humans operating on parity with automatons. Questions being addressed in ongoing research include: How are mixed human/robot team operations perceived by the humans, and how do their perceptions affect their function? The talk will emphasize research and experiments recently conducted on how humans make certain prototype decisions and how the dynamics of these decisions change over time as a function of the group dynamics. Social factors in decision dynamics will be examined. Ethical question regarding machine decisions concerning human life will also be examined.

Biography.
John Baillieul holds professorial appointments in three departments at Boston University: he is Professor of Aerospace/Mechanical Engineering, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engtineering and Professor of Manufacturing Engineering. He is past Chairman of Aerospace/Mechanical Engineering and also past Chairman of the Department of Manufacturing Engineering. He has served as Associate Dean for Academic Programs in the B.U. College of Engineering. After receiving the Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1975, he joined the Mathematics Department of Georgetown University. During the academic year 1983-84 he was the Vinton Hayes Visiting Scientist in Robotics at Harvard University, and in 1991 he was visiting scientist in the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT. Professor Baillieul has been an active member of the IEEE Control Systems Society for many years. From 1984 through 1985 he was an Associate Editor of the Transactions on Automatic Control, and in 1987 he served as Program Chairman of the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in Los Angeles. He is past Associate Editor of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Newsletter and was a member of the editorial board of the journal Bifurcation and Chaos in Applied Sciences and Engineering. He was Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control for six years from 1992 through this past June. Currently, he is on the editorial boards of the Proceedings of the IEEE, the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Communications in Information and Systems, and the journal Robotics and Computer Integrated Manufacturing. He has been named Fellow of the IEEE for his contributions to nonlinear control theory, robotics, and the control of complex mechanical systems. He is a recent recipient of the IEEE Third Millennium Medal for various professional contributions. He is past IEEE Control Systems Society Vice-President for Technical Activities and IEEE CSS Vice-President for Publications. He currently is serving as CSS President. At the level of the corporate IEEE, Professor Baillieul's service has included four years as TAB Transactions Chair (1998 through 2001), member at large of the Publications Services and Products Board (PSPB) (1999 - 2004, 2006 - ), Chair of the PSPB Strategic Planning Committee (2001 - 2002), and Chair of the PSPB Finance Committee (PSPB Treasurer, 2004). During 2005, John Baillieul chaired the PSPB Ad Hoc Committee on the IEEE Press of the Future. Committee recommendations were distilled into a business plan which the IEEE Press Board and the PSPB are now working to execute. Currently, Baillieul is IEEE Vice President of Publication Services and Products.

John Baillieul's research deals with robotics, the control of mechanical systems, and mathematical system theory. His PhD dissertation, completed at Harvard University under the direction of R.W. Brockett in 1975, was an early work dealing with connections between optimal control theory and what has recently been called ``sub-Riemannian geometry.'' After publishing a number of papers developing geometric methods for nonlinear optimal control problems, he turned his attention to problems in the control of nonlinear systems modeled by homogeneous polynomial differential equations. Such systems describe, for example, the controlled dynamics of a rigid body. His main controllability theorem applied the concept of finiteness embodied in the Hilbert basis theorem to develop a controllability condition which could be verified by checking the rank of an explicit finite dimensional operator. During the mid 1980's, Baillieul collaborated with M. Levi to develop a control theory for rotating elastic systems. Recently, he has written a number of papers on motion planning and control of kinematically redundant manipulators, and he has become interested in problems associated with anholonomy in planning motions for robots which have elastic joints and other components which store energy. Much of his present research is devoted to applying the methods of dynamical systems theory and classical geometric nonlinear control theory to problems of current technological interest. In particular, he is working on applications of mathematical control theory to fluid structure interactions, microelectromechanism dynamics, adaptive optics, and network mediated control of large scale device arrays. Recent　developments in this research has led him to work on the interplay between communications and information theory and control.