It is my pleasure to let you all know I am part of the program committee for the VAT4HRT Workshop.

My paper Robot Health Indicator: A Visual Cue to Improve Level of Autonomy Switching Systems will also be presented in this workshop.

Here’s the abstract of the paper

Using different Levels of Autonomy (LoA), a human operator can vary the extent of control they have over a robot’s actions. LoAs enable operators to mitigate a robot’s performance degradation or limitations in the its autonomous capabilities. However, LoA regulation and other tasks may often overload an operator’s cogni- tive abilities. Inspired by video game user interfaces, we study if adding a ‘Robot Health Bar’ to the robot control UI can reduce the cognitive demand and perceptual effort required for LoA regulation while promoting trust and transparency. This Health Bar uses the robot vitals and robot health framework to quantify and present runtime performance degradation in robots. Results from our pi- lot study indicate that when using a health bar, operators used to manual control more to minimise the risk of robot failure during high performance degradation. It also gave us insights and lessons to inform subsequent experiments on human-robot teaming.

See you all at HRI. Fair warning though - I look better in my photos than in reality, so you may have a tough time finding me.