A message from the ECHORD coordinator Alois Knoll

PsyIntEC - Psychophysiological interaction and empathetic cognition for human-robot cooperative work

PsyIntEC is a feasibility demonstration project targeting safe ergonomic and empathetic adaptation by a robotic system to the needs and characteristics of a human co-worker in a joint human-robot work cell. Inputs to the robot control system will include psychophysiological (or biometric) data from the human co-worker, which will provide the basis for affective and cognitive modelling of the human by the robot as a basis for behavioural adaptation.

The target industrial scenario is a small to medium enterprise (SME) engaged in rapid prototyping of novel devices. The PsyIntEC project will focus upon demonstrating the feasibility of robotic guidance, support and facilitation of collaborative human-robot prototype production, emphasizing support for human emotion and attention regulation, modulation and assessment (e.g. maintaining optimum levels of human attentional engagement in the task at hand) during cooperative human-robot task performance, based upon the use of biometric data to measure human affective, emotional and cognitive states.

Objectives include the development of:

a collaborative human-robot work cell as the technology platform fro the experiment, including a stereoscopic vision system for the robot, two human scale articulated robot arms, an eye gaze tracking system, and psychophysiological interfaces for a human co-worker including EEG, GSR and EMG. The vision system and articulated arms will be organized in an approximately anthropomorphic configuration

a human cognition and affect model with real-time automated state updates based upon data inputs from biometric interfaces

robot decision and adaptive task performance models informed by the robot’s human factors, cognition and affect model, used to accomplish empathetic and supportive action generation to achieve reference tasks while optimizing human safety, job satisfaction/engagement and task performance

a rigorous experimental design and evaluation framework that can be used to design, quantify and compare task performance, decision-making, cognitive and human emotional/affective states of: i) an individual human worker , ii) two collaborating human workers, iii) a collaborative human-robot system in different configurations, in relation to a set of reference tasks.