3. DEPENBABILITY ASPECTS IN HUMAN FRIENDLY ROBOTICS

A central direction of research today concerns the field of Human Friendly Robotics also noted as Human Centered Robotics. Central to this large spectrum of novel applications, the domain of Assistive and Personal Robotics, both by its technical aspects and societal and economical impacts, opens a true Grand Challenge.

All around the world growing interest and increased efforts are shown in basic research projects as well as, in several large scale cooperative programmes aiming to demonstrative realizations.

Several French Researchers Laboratories contribute in many ways to the field development as well (see IARP 2000 activity report). For the current year, we wish to underline the interest and instrumental action carried on to promote as a key research issue, which effectively controls real world machines, the theme of Robot Dependability.




3.1. A WS framework

France through general initiatives and with salient contributions of several field-concerned researchers has actively participated to the first workshop (Seoul, May 21-22 2001) co-organized by IARP and IEEE-RAS: Technical Challenge for Dependability aspects in Human Friendly Robotics.

The workshop objective attempted to bring to the forefront of the international scene Dependability as a key theme.

Central to the current Robotics developments stressing the paramount role, in its various themes, of Machine Intelligence, there is the highly challenging domain of human-centered robotics where machines have to closely interact with humans.

Within these R&D directions, the application cases encompassed by public-oriented service, assistive and personal robotics emphasize the human-machine interaction where the person may be either a non-professional user or a by-stander, or both.

This clearly points out to the critical questions of Physical Safety and Operating Robustness. Both aspects can be captured by the concept of Dependability.

Unlike in the industrial robotics domain where the workspace of machines and humans can be segmented, service and personal robots cannot but have contact interaction. The safety aspects entailed is, of course, already an important challenge addressed to Robotics research.

Still we believe a more difficult and far reaching challenge concerns Operating Robustness. Here, the issues are central to the very concept of "Intelligent" robots.




3.2. Conclusions and recommendations

Among the WS conclusions and recommendations, we believe important to quote the following ones, which focus on major technical issues [see the WS report]:

Safety, one of the major components of Dependability, has been largely considered both as a firmly established part of industrial robotics and one of the important factors considered in several new robotics domains, e.g. surgical robots. Most naturally, it appears as important to further build on existing results and tools.

One of the most salient aspects in considering Dependability in relation to Human-Friendly Robotics relates to the multi-faced interactions between the human and the machine (dialog, contact, ...). Here, we need to encompass very difficult issues, some of them key conceptual factors different from the ones captured by Dependability in computing systems.

A large debate about Dependability by Design concluded to the imperious necessity to concurrently design for system dependability and for robot functionalities. This is certainly one of the major facts we have learnt from others fields.