Category: Bristol Robotics Laboratory

Robots. What could possibly go wrong?

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A new project studies how to investigate accidents with social robots, Alan Winfield explains why this is needed…

Originally posted on September 17th, 2019 by Alan Winfield on his blog.

Imagine that your elderly mother, or grandmother, has an assisted living robot to help her live independently at home. The robot is capable of fetching her drinks, reminding her to take her medicine and keeping in touch with family. Then one afternoon you get a call from a neighbour who has called round and sees your grandmother collapsed on the floor. When the paramedics arrive they find the robot wandering around apparently aimlessly. One of its functions is to call for help if your grandmother stops moving, but it seems that the robot failed to do this. 

Fortunately your grandmother recovers but the doctors find bruising on her legs, consistent with the robot running into them. Not surprisingly you want to know what happened: did the robot cause the accident? Or maybe it didn’t but made matters worse, and why did it fail to raise the alarm?

Although this is a fictional scenario it could happen today. If it did you would be totally reliant on the goodwill of the robot manufacturer to discover what went wrong. Even then you might not get the answers you seek; it’s entirely possible the robot and the company that made it are just not equipped with the tools and processes to undertake an investigation.

Right now there are no established processes for robot accident investigation. 

Of course accidents happen, and that’s just as true for robots as any other machinery [1].

Finding statistics is tough. But this web page shows serious accidents with industrial robots in the US since the mid 1980s. Driverless car fatalities of course make the headlines. There have been five (that we know about) since 2016. But we have next to no data on accidents in human robot interaction (HRI); that is for robots designed to interact directly with humans. Here is one – a security robot – that happened to be reported.

But a Responsible Roboticist must be interested in all accidents, whether serious or not. We should also be very interested in near misses; these are taken very seriously in aviation [2], and there is good evidence that reporting near misses improves safety.

So I am very excited to introduce our 5-year EPSRC funded project RoboTIPS – responsible robots for the digital economy. Led by Professor Marina Jirotka at the University of Oxford, we believe RoboTIPS to be the first project with the aim of systematically studying the question of how to investigate accidents with social robots.

So what are we doing in RoboTIPS..?

First we will look at the technology needed to support accident investigation.

In a paper published 2 years ago Marina and I argued the case for an Ethical Black Box (EBB) [3]. Our proposition is very simple: that all robots (and some AIs) should be equipped by law with a standard device which continuously records a time stamped log of the internal state of the system, key decisions, and sampled input or sensor data (in effect the robot equivalent of an aircraft flight data recorder). Without such a device finding out what the robot was doing, and why, in the moments leading up to an accident is more or less impossible. In RoboTIPS we will be developing and testing a model EBB for social robots.

But accident investigation is a human process of discovery and reconstruction. So in this project we will be designing and running three staged (mock) accidents, each covering a different application domain: 
assisted living robots, educational (toy) robots, and driverless cars.
In these scenarios we will be using real robots and will be seeking human volunteers to act in three roles, as the subject(s) of the accident, witnesses to the accident, and as members of the accident investigation team.
Thus we aim to develop and demonstrate both technologies and processes (and ultimately policy recommendations) for robot accident investigation. And the whole project will be conducted within the framework of Responsible Research and Innovation; it will, in effect, be a case study in Responsible Robotics.

References:

[1] Dhillon BS (1991) Robot Accidents. In: Robot Reliability and Safety. Springer, New York, NY
[2] Macrae C (2014) Close Calls: Managing risk and resilience in Airline flight safety, Palgrave macmillan.
[3] Winfield AFT and Jirotka M (2017) The Case for an Ethical Black Box. In: Gao Y, Fallah S, Jin Y, Lekakou C (eds) Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems. TAROS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 10454. Springer, Cham.

Bristol Technology Showcase this Friday!

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The one day conference and expo coming to Aerospace Bristol this Friday (8th November), focuses on how new and emerging technologies will affect businesses and wider society.

Industry leading experts will be taking part in panel discussions and leading talks about the future of various technologies and industries. While local Bristol Tech will be showcasing in the expo.

Find out more on the Bristol Technology Showcase website.

Event-AgendaDownload

Find discounted tickets on Eventbrite here.

And here’s a video from one of the speakers who is leading a session on the Future of vertical farming.

UWE introduce teenagers to robots and programming

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Senior Research fellow from the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, Severin Lemaignan, took a team of students and plenty of robots to Bristol’s Teen Tech Fair earlier this month.

Teen Tech Festivals pop up across the UK to inspire the innovators of tomorrow -teenagers! On Thursday 10th October, local businesses turned up to Bristol’s Pavilion to help young people understand the opportunities in the science, technology and engineering industries.

Lemaignan was enthusiastic about how his robotic programming activity was received. “About 60 children came and visited us. They all went through a bit of robot exploration with the Thymios, trying to guess their different behaviours, and relate them to the sensors and actuators that the robots have; followed by a short introduction to programming with the Vectors: 
how can we get the robot to avoid a wall?”

Students, Ranvir Bhogal, Bethany Mackey and Jiangyin Sun, helped facilitate the short 15 minute activities.

“All of the instructors, activity leaders and ambassadors were tirelessly energetic with infectious enthusiasm. They used language to explain concepts to the pupils in an accessible way. Not all of mine are regular users of technical vocabulary but I felt that they understood all that they needed to and learnt loads! They have come away inspired and really excited about entering the TeenTech Awards. I also had a lovely day!”

Comment from a Teacher who attended.

You can find out more about Teen Tech below and read the report from the day here.

First UK study into driverless cars for older people draws to a close

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On Tuesday 21st May an autonomous vehicle was used by older people around the St Monica Trust’s Cote Lane retirement village, bringing a world-leading research project to a close.

The £5.5M project, “Flourish”, is delivered by a consortium of organisations including UWE Bristol and is the only Innovate UK funded project focused on older people. Launched in 2016, the project aims to develop a driverless vehicle integrating older people’s mobility needs with a secure and connected infrastructure.

The project works across three specialist areas at UWE Bristol, including the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. The demonstration explored how driverless vehicles, known as CAVs (connected and autonomous vehicles) could make a difference to older people’s everyday lives.

More information is available through UWE Bristol news.

Developing Responsible Robots for the Digital Economy

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Professor Alan Winfield will be starting a new five year EPSRC funded project with Professor Marina Jirotka (University of Oxford), staging mock human-robot accidents in order to deeply explore the problem of robot accident investigation and develop both technical (i.e. data logging and explainer systems) and process solutions (i.e. frameworks for how to responsibly conduct such investigations).

The team will explore three scenarios, likely to be: assisted living (care) robots; robot toys and Autonomous Vehicles – with human volunteers role playing as the subject of, witnesses to, and the investigators of the accident. Alan believes this will be the first research project in the world to fully and systematically study this important aspect of real world robotics.

Robotics Workshop for Businesses

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Engineers from the Robotics Innovation Facility (RIFBristol) recently delivered two workshops for businesses interested in exploring the potential benefits of robotics and automation. 

As part of the Facility’s new £1m ERDF-funded initiative, the SABRE Programme, a free two-day ‘Introduction to Robotics’ workshop was offered to small and medium-sized enterprises operating in the West of England.  The same introductory workshop was also delivered exclusively for clients of the Somerset Energy Innovation Centre by PhD students from the FARSCOPE Centre for Doctoral Training. 

Through these two activities, RIFBristol attracted businesses from a diverse range of sectors to its dedicated workspace in the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (from civil engineering and manufacturing, to the brewing and creative industries).

Work up to running 5 km with the Pepper Robot!

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In this guest post, Katie Winkle of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory tells us about an opportunity to get involved in her exciting research.

I’m going to be running an ambitious (and exciting!) research study over the summer period and am putting out a first call for participants. This will be my final big study as a PhD student and brings together all of my previous work to date – some of you may have taken part in my previous experiments e.g. doing wrist turns with Pepper or arm exercises with the NAO robot. I would really appreciate it if you would consider taking part and/or share with friends and family etc. who may be interested. 

We will be installing a Pepper robot (picture below from one of my previous studies) in the Wallscourt Gym here on campus and using it to guide people through the NHS designed ‘Couch to 5k’ programme (https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/exercise/get-running-with-couch-to-5k/) designed to help people work up to running 5 km. Over the course of the programme, we will be investigating the use of supervised machine learning to have a human fitness instructor train the robot on how to be an encouraging ‘coach’.

The programme is made up of 3x ~30 minute exercise sessions per week over 9 weeks – so participants should be available and able to visit campus over the summer period (approx.3rd June up until 18thAugustbut there is time built in for participants to take a week or two off for holidays etc. We will make the robot and exercise instructor available at set times each week and set-up an online booking system for participants to choose slots from. One reason for starting to recruit now is so that we can make sure these time slots work for as many people as possible. 

InformationSheetDownload

An initial information sheet is attached above, but essentially we are looking for participants who are:

– over 18, fluent in English, with no health conditions that might prevent engaging in the Couch to 5K programme

– generally available and able to attend 3x ~30 minute weekly exercise sessions at the Wallscourt Gym on Frenchay Campus from early June to mid-August

– interested in signing up for a long-term exercise programme to get running!

If you are interested in taking part please drop me an email and/or go ahead and complete this poll to give an idea of what day/times you might be available to work out! https://forms.gle/PG7zjHA1DVBqUmEx9

Emerging tech researchers: Are you losing funding opportunities by not engaging in interdisciplinary research?

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The development of technology is accelerating in many fields and affecting multiple aspects of our day-to-day lives. Meanwhile, both AI and universities are black boxes, but they don’t need to be. A series of four workshops aimed at mutual learning, networking and grant writing aimed at researchers interested in emerging technologies are to be held at UWE Bristol.

Please contact Aleksandra (aleksandra.michalec@uwe.ac.uk) or Mehdi (mehdi.sobhani@uwe.ac.uk) for more information.

Celebrating Da Vinci and his pioneering inventions

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Dr Appolinaire Etoundi, Senior Lecturer in Mechatronics from Bristol Robotics Laboratory, will be exhibiting bioinspired devices from Chisel Works Robotics and Rose Industries at the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery on 4th May, 10am—4pm. This forms part of the exhibition celebrating Leonardo Da Vinci and his pioneering inventions.

Two of Appolinaire’s students, who are CEOs of the registered companies, are also attending, to promote the research they are undertaking at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory.

Sara Parker, award-winning Radio producer and reporter came to UWE on Thursday 21st March to interview Appolinaire for a BBC Radio 4 series about the remarkable multi-disciplinary vision of Leonardo with each episode focusing on different disciplines through interviews with contemporary experts in fields such as flight, engineering, anatomy – and of course robotics.

The programme will be aired at 1:45 pm on 2nd May.

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