Junxiang (Jim) Wang 王俊翔

Effective physical human-robot interaction requires systems that are not only adaptable to user preferences but also transparent about their actions. This paper introduces BRIDGE, a system for bidirectional human-robot communication in physical assistance. Our method allows users to modify a robot’s planned trajectory – position, velocity, and force – in real time using natural language. We utilize a large language model (LLM) to interpret any trajectory modifications implied by user commands in the context of the planned motion and conversation history. Importantly, our system provides verbal feedback in response to the user, either assuring any resulting changes or posing a clarifying question. We evaluated our method in a user study with 18 older adults across three assistive tasks, comparing BRIDGE to an ablation without verbal feedback and a baseline. Results show that participants successfully used the system to modify trajectories in real time. Moreover, the bidirectional feedback led to significantly higher ratings of interactivity and transparency, demonstrating that the robot’s verbal response is critical for a more intuitive user experience.

Our work addresses the challenges older adults face with commercial Voice Assistants (VAs), notably in conversation breakdowns and error handling. Traditional methods of collecting user experiences-usage logs and post-hoc interviews-do not fully capture the intricacies of older adults’ interactions with VAs, particularly regarding their reactions to errors. To bridge this gap, we equipped 15 older adults’ homes with smart speakers integrated with custom audio recorders to collect "in-the-wild" audio interaction data for detailed error analysis. Recognizing the conversational limitations of current VAs, our study also explored the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to handle natural and imperfect text for improving VAs. Midway through our study, we deployed ChatGPT-powered VA to investigate its efficacy for older adults. Our research suggests leveraging vocal and verbal responses combined with LLMs’ contextual capabilities for enhanced error prevention and management in VAs, while proposing design considerations to align VA capabilities with older adults’ expectations.

Clear communication of robot intent fosters transparency and interpretability in physical human-robot interaction (pHRI), particularly during assistive tasks involving direct human-robot contact. We introduce CoRI, a pipeline that automatically generates natural language communication of a robot’s upcoming actions directly from its motion plan and visual perception. Our pipeline first processes the robot’s image view to identify human poses and key environmental features. It then encodes the planned 3D spatial trajectory (including velocity and force) onto this view, visually grounding the path and its dynamics. CoRI queries a vision-language model with this visual representation to interpret the planned action within the visual context before generating concise, user-directed statements, without relying on task-specific information. Results from a user study involving robot-assisted feeding, bathing, and shaving tasks across two different robots indicate that CoRI leads to statistically significant difference in communication clarity compared to a baseline communication strategy. Specifically, CoRI effectively conveys not only the robot’s high-level intentions but also crucial details about its motion and any collaborative user action needed.

Telesurgery is an effective way to deliver service from expert surgeons to areas without immediate access to specialized resources. However, many of these areas, such as rural districts or battlefields, might be subject to different problems in communication, especially latency and intermittent periods of communication outage. This challenge motivates the use of a digital twin for the surgical system, where a simulation would mirror the robot hardware and surgical environment in the real world. The surgeon would then be able to interact with the digital twin during communication outage, followed by a recovery strategy on the real robot upon reestablishing communication. This paper builds the digital twin for the da Vinci surgical robot, with a buffering and replay strategy that reduces the mean task completion time by 23 % when compared to the baseline, for a peg transfer task subject to intermittent communication outage.

Conventional Voice Assistants (VAs) rely on traditional language models to discern user intent and respond to their queries, leading to interactions that often lack a broader contextual understanding, an area in which Large Language Models (LLMs) excel. However, current LLMs are largely designed for text-based interactions, thus making it unclear how user interactions will evolve if their modality is changed to voice. In this work, we investigate whether LLMs can enrich VA interactions via an exploratory study with participants (N=20) using a ChatGPT-powered VA for three scenarios (medical self-diagnosis, creative planning, and discussion) with varied constraints, stakes, and objectivity. We observe that LLM-powered VA elicits richer interaction patterns that vary across tasks, showing its versatility. Notably, LLMs absorb the majority of VA intent recognition failures. We additionally discuss the potential of harnessing LLMs for more resilient and fluid user-VA interactions and provide design guidelines for tailoring LLMs for voice assistance.