Research Project

COHERENT: Collaborative hierarchical robotic explanations

Type

European Project

Start Date

01/04/2021

End Date

31/03/2024

Project Code

PCI2020-120718-2

Project illustration

Staff

Project Description

Project PCI2020-120718-2 funded by MCIN/ AEI /10.13039/501100011033 and cofunded by the "European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR"

For robots to build trustable interactions with users two aspects will be crucial during the next decade. First, the ability to produce explainable decisions combining reasons from all the levels of the robotic architecture from low to high level; and second, to be able to effectively communicate such decisions and re-plan according to new user inputs in real-time along with the execution.

COHERENT will develop a novel framework to combine explanations originated at the different robotic levels into a single explanation. This combination is not unique and may depend on several factors including the step into the action sequence, or the temporal importance of each information source. Robotic tasks are interesting because they entail performing a sequence of actions, and thus the system must be able to deliver these explanations also during the execution of the task, either because the user requested or actively because an unforeseen situation occurs. COHERENT will propose effective evaluation metrics oriented to the special case of explanations in HRI systems. The proposed measures, based on trustworthiness and acceptance, will be defined together with the definition of benchmark tasks that are repeatable and enable the comparison of results across different explainable developments.

We will demonstrate our framework for hierarchical explanation components through a manipulation task of assisting a human to fold clothes. Cloth manipulation is a very rich example that requires considering bi-manual manipulations, environmental constraints, and perception of textiles for its state estimation. Eventually, the robot can even require the user to help in doing difficult actions by providing relevant information, so interaction opportunities are multiple. We will build on previous results on cloth manipulation to develop explainable machine learning techniques from the perception, learned movements, task planning and interaction layers, based on a novel generic representation, the Cohesion Graph, that is shared across the layers. The COHERENT framework will be integrated into the standard planning system ROSplan to increase its visibility and adoption.

Consortium:
Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial (IRI), CSIC-UPC, Spain (Coordinator)
King’s College London (KCL), United Kingdom
University of Naples Federico II, Italy

Call: European CHIST-ERA 2019
Funds are provided by national research funding organisations. IRI is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN).

Coherent Website

Project Publications

Journal Publications

  • S. Forgas, R. Huertas, A. Andriella and G. Alenyà. Does the personality of consumers influence the assessment of the experience of interaction with social robots?. International Journal of Social Robotics, 16: 1167-1187, 2024.

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  • G. Canal, C. Torras and G. Alenyà. Generating predicate suggestions based on the space of plans: an example of planning with preferences. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, 33: 333-357, 2023.

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  • A. Andriella, C. Torras, C. Abdelnour and G. Alenyà. Introducing CARESSER: A framework for in situ learning robot social assistance from expert knowledge and demonstrations. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, 33: 441-496, 2023.

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  • A. Olivares-Alarcos, S. Foix, S. Borgo and G. Alenyà. OCRA – An ontology for collaborative robotics and adaptation. Computers in Industry, 132: 103627, 2022.

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  • A. Andriella, R. Huertas, S. Forgas, C. Torras and G. Alenyà. “I know how you feel” The importance of interaction style on users’ acceptance in an entertainment scenario. Interaction Studies: Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems, 23(1): 21-57, 2022.

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Conference Publications

  • G. Tzelepis, A. Eren Erdal, J. Borràs and G. Alenyà. Semantic state estimation in robot cloth manipulations using domain adaptation from human demonstrations, 19th International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications, 2024, Rome (Italy), pp. 172-182.

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  • S. Izquierdo, G. Canal, C. Rizzo and G. Alenyà. PlanCollabNL: leveraging Large Language Models for adaptive plan generation in human-robot collaboration, 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2024, Yokohama (Japan), pp. 17344-17350.

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  • I. Garcia-Camacho, L. Alberta, M.C. Welle, G. Alenyà, D. Kragic and J. Borràs. Standardization of cloth objects and its relevance in robotic manipulation, 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2024, Yokohama (Japan), pp. 8298-8304.

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  • S. Izquierdo, G. Canal, G. Alenyà, C. Rizzo and A. Coles. Planning for human-robot collaboration scenarios with heterogeneous costs and durations, 27th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2024, Santiago de Compostela (Spain), to appear.

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  • A. Suárez, A. Andriella, C. Torras and G. Alenyà. User interactions and negative examples to improve the learning of semantic rules in a cognitive exercise scenario, 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2023, Detroit, MI, USA, pp. 7953-7960.

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  • G. Tzelepis, J. Borràs, A. Eren Erdal and G. Alenyà. Semantic state prediction in robotic cloth manipulation, 2023 Intelligent Systems Conference, 2023, Amsterdam, pp. 205-219, Springer Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems.

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  • J. Borràs, A. Boix, S. Foix and C. Torras. A virtual reality framework for fast dataset creation applied to cloth manipulation with automatic semantic labelling, 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2023, London (UK), pp. 11605-11611.

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  • A. Olivares-Alarcos, A. Andriella, S. Foix and G. Alenyà. Robot explanatory narratives of collaborative and adaptive experiences, 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2023, London (UK), pp. 11964-11971.

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  • S. Izquierdo, G. Canal, C. Rizzo and G. Alenyà. Improved task planning through failure anticipation in human-robot collaboration, 2022 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2022, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, pp. 7875-7880.

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  • I. Garcia-Camacho, J. Borràs and G. Alenyà. Knowledge representation to enable high-level planning in cloth manipulation tasks, 2022 ICAPS Workshop on Knowledge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling, 2022, Singapore (Virtual), pp. 9.

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  • A. Rossi, A. Andriella, S. Rossi, C. Torras and G. Alenyà. Evaluating the effect of Theory of Mind on people's trust in a faulty robot, 31st IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2022, Napoli, Italy, pp. 477-482.

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Other Publications

  • A. Olivares-Alarcos, S. Foix and G. Alenyà. Time to contact for robot safety stop in close collaborative tasks. In Human-robot collaboration: unlocking the potential for industrial applications, 87-104. Institution of Engineering Technology, 2023.

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