Human–robot interaction

The word robot was first used to describe artificial automata in a Czech play in 1920 and literally meant ‘forced labour’. From the inception of the term and recent progress in the field of AI, society has often panicked society about the effect of robots in terms of job loss, machine takeover and a loss for humanity. However, robots have kept on making inroads in multiple segments of society, from industrial automation to precision surgery. This chapter will discuss human–robot interaction (HRI) for three different applications: collaborative robots (cobots) for industrial applications, social robots and assistive robots. We will briefly discuss the main goals of each application, followed by a case study on developing safe human–robot interaction for persons with severe speech and motor impairments. A second case study will briefly describe the building blocks of a LLM-controlled semi-autonomous rover, where the destination will be given by a human through natural language or even an image, and the robot autonomously navigates to the desired destination, avoiding obstacles. The chapter will emphasize applications of intelligent user interfaces for semi-autonomous control of robotic agents.