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Alan Schultz Adjunct Faculty (Adjunct) No longer a member of RI.

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Research interests

My current research passion is human-robot interaction with an emphasis in cognitive robotics, multi-modal interaction, and social robotics. In general, I am interested in peer-to-peer relationships between humans and robots working together in teams. The interactions should be natural for the human, with the robots accommodating the human, not the human having to accommodate the robot.

Cognitive Robotics:

In cognitive robotics, we wish to create cognitively capable robots that can interact more naturally with humans. Through analysis of human team behavior, we build computational cognitive models of particular high-level human skills that we have determined to be critical for good peer-to-peer collaboration and interaction. We then use these cognitive models as reasoning mechanisms on the robot, allowing the robot to make decisions that are conducive to good interaction with the human.

Multi-Modal Interfaces:

Interactions with the robot should be natural for the human, given the particular task at hand. Good interfaces should use a combination of speech/language, gestures and other interfaces like sketch pads.

Social Robotics:

Robots must not intrude in our life. As robots become more ubiquitous, we will be interacting with them not only as users, but also incidentally. Robots must act in a friendly manner, and should respect social standards. By using computational cognitive models, we can give robots these social skills.

Past Labs & Groups

Human-Robot Interaction Group - We are interested in many aspects of human-robot interaction related to how humans and robots can work safely and effectively together.

Reliable Autonomous Systems Lab - We are developing reliable, highly autonomous systems (especially mobile robots) that operate in rich, uncertain environments.

Past Projects

Grace - The Grace project is a collaboration among several schools and research labs to design a robot capable of fully performing the AAAI Grand Challenge.	Roboceptionist - In collaboration with the Drama Department, we are developing technology for long-term social interaction.
Social Robots - We are developing robots with personality.

Publications

Note: This list may not be comprehensive. It contains only those publications in the RI publications database. Entries are listed in reverse chronological order.

• A Preliminary Study of Peer-to-Peer Human-Robot Interaction
  T.W. Fong, J. Scholtz, J. Shah, L. Flueckiger, C. Kunz, D. Lees, J. Schreiner, M. Siegel, L. Hiatt, I. Nourbakhsh, R. Simmons, R. Ambrose, R. Burridge, B. Antonishek, M. Bugajska, A. Schultz, and J.G. Trafton
  International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, IEEE, October, 2006. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [737 KB] copyrighted

• Common Metrics for Human-Robot Interaction
  A. Steinfeld, T.W. Fong, D. Kaber, M. Lewis, J. Scholtz, A. Schultz, and M. Goodrich
  2006 Human-Robot Interaction Conference, ACM, March, 2006. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [110 KB] copyrighted

• The Peer-to-Peer Human-Robot Interaction Project
  T.W. Fong, I. Nourbakhsh, R. Ambrose, R. Simmons, A. Schultz, and J. Scholtz
  AIAA Space 2005, September, 2005. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [642 KB] copyrighted

• Designing Robots for Long-Term Social Interaction
  R. Gockley, A. Bruce, J. Forlizzi, M.P. Michalowski, A. Mundell, S. Rosenthal, B.P. Sellner, R. Simmons, K. Snipes, A. Schultz, and J. Wang
  Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2005), IEEE, August, 2005, pp. 2199 - 2204. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [593 KB] copyrighted