Computational time scales for social interaction in multi-scale robotics

Abstract

Computational processes are becoming ever more complex and computationally expensive in modern robotics and advanced automation. Robotic social interaction is an important and developing area in modern robotics that involves complex and computationally intensive processes which operate on a range of computational time scales. One of the key challenges in social robotics is for robots to react quickly, in real-time, to maintain genuine sociability with humans. A novel solution for speeding up robotic reaction times is through the use of dynamic load distribution and parallelisation of robotic behaviours within a distributed control framework. This project aims to enhance computational performance in social robotics by developing a novel computational distribution paradigm (CDP), which is a software platform that manages load distribution and parallelisation while maintaining distributed control and dependencies of functional abilities for a mobile robot. The CDP provides dynamic load-balancing and parallelisation of processes across a multi-scale hardware hierarchy that caters for various computational time scales and also enables access to scalable, high performance computing resources, the Internet and external functional capabilities. Multi-scale and hierarchically based aspects of distributed computing are used by the CDP where trade-offs are made between computational speed, physical size and financial costs. Trade-offs, found in the design of traditional computing hardware, can also be applied to robotic cognition due to the inherent similarities of embodied computational performance and traditional computing characteristics. Despite the project’s focus towards robotic social behaviours, the CDP can be applied to computational processes running on any combination of computational hardware grouped by a network, including embodied mobile devices. The CDP was designed and implemented as a software platform with an application programming interface using Aldebaran’s Nao robot as the robot platform. Interactive human-robot social behaviours that involved sound localisation and object recognition were implemented with the CDP using the full range of a computational hardware hierarchy to demonstrate the CDP’s functionality. The social behaviour experiments showed that distribution architectures for mobile robotic platforms were beneficial in improving the performance of robot computation and enabling increased functionality in some situations. The developed CDP solved, at the most basic levels, the problem of dynamic load distribution and parallelisation for robotic behaviours within a distributed control framework and provides a new approach to implementing robot behaviours.