Recent advances in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are enabling the smart robotic assistants that will change the way we live and work in the future. The use of smart robotic assistants opens the door to new applications by augmenting human capabilities, increasing human productivity, enabling innovation, making workplaces more accessible to people with disabilities, and ultimately improving our quality of life. Active human supervision is essential for deploying robotic assistants in challenging scenarios where time- and safety-critical decisions need to be made. Without assistance, however, human supervisors are prone to making suboptimal decisions due to work-related stress, fatigue, and information overload. AI is the key enabling technology for improving human decision making and guiding human-robot team design and operation. This presentation will focus on human-robot interaction, collaboration, and communication issues to improve the overall team performance. First, I will discuss computational foundations towards AI-enabled risk assessment, alert generation, and robot tasking suggestion generation to assist human supervisors. Second, I will discuss computational methods for endowing robots with introspective capabilities so that they can seek help from humans on challenging tasks and manage contingencies. Finally, I will present new interaction modalities for enabling robots to elicit human guidance during the decision-making process. The presentation will conclude by giving a summary of the current limitations of the technologies and an overview of on-going research to address these limitations.
Dr. Satyandra K. Gupta holds Smith International Professorship in the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California. He serves as the Director of the Center for Advanced Manufacturing. He is also Co-founder and Chief Scientist of GrayMatter Robotics. Dr. Gupta’s research interests are physics-informed artificial intelligence, computational foundations for decision making, and human-centered automation. He works on applications related to Computer-Aided Design, Manufacturing Automation, and Robotics. He has published more than four hundred technical articles in journals, conference proceedings, and edited books. He is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Solid Modeling Association (SMA), and Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME). He has served as the editor-in-chief of the ASME Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering. Dr. Gupta has received numerous honors and awards for his scholarly contributions. Representative examples include a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research in 2000, Robert W. Galvin Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award from the Society of Manufacturing Engineers in 2001, CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2001, Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2001, Invention of the Year Award at the University of Maryland in 2007, Kos Ishii-Toshiba Award from ASME in 2011, Excellence in Research Award from ASME Computers and Information in Engineering Division in 2013, Distinguished Alumnus Award from Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee in 2014, and ASME Design Automation Award in 2021. He was named “The 20 most influential professors in smart manufacturing” by Smart Manufacturing Magazine in June 2020. He was given Use-Inspired Research Award by Viterbi School of Engineering in 2021 for creating solutions that are addressing US aerospace and defense industry’s needs in the advanced manufacturing area. He has also received ten best paper awards at international conferences. He currently serves as a member of the Technical Advisory Committee for Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) Institute and a member of the National Materials and Manufacturing Board (NMMB).
