Tele-operation and Human Robots Interactions

We are daily and continuously interacting with machines and so-called ‘intelligent’ manmade entities. We push buttons and we read instructions to get money from cashdispensers, we tune the washing machine or microwave oven with more or less efforts quasi-every day. Following that, one can easily admit that our era is heavily based on manmachines interactions and the easiness one has in handling such machines is capital, mainly in terms economical, social and psychological impacts. Robots, as a singular sub-set of these machines, are also subject to the same constraints and preoccupations. Moreover and unlikely to mobile phones, PDA or other intelligent devices, interactions with or through robots (tele-operation scheme) are more critical and more specific: interactions with robots are critical because robots are designed to achieve complex tasks within versatile, changing and hazardous environments. They are specific because robots are used instead (sometimes as extensions) of humans (for safety or for economical reasons) leading to confusions between machine-robot and living-robot concepts. The objective robot (the machine executing a program) and the subjective robot (the anthropomorphic robot and its image in folks mind) are entities too complex to be seen only as simple input-output black boxes. We believe that interactions with and through robots need very advanced and multi-disciplinary methodologies for designing human-robots communication, co-operation and collaboration interfaces. In this chapter, we give our vision for human-robots interactions. For this purpose, we propose to revisit the robotics timeline. We will show through this timeline the strong relations between robotics and tele-operation. These relations will be depicted under two perspectives: firstly, from human-robots interactions point of view and then from robots autonomy one. The natural and effective junction between these two visions will take place with the companion robot, e.g. the autonomous robot which is able to co-operate and to collaborate with humans. We belive that before reaching this robotics’ ultimate goal, one must answer to a central problem: how humans perceive robots? This formultaion and the answers one can give to the question will undoubtly lead to design effective robots and simplified tools allwoing natural and transparent human-robts intercations. The document is organized as follow: the first part gives some historical hints letting the reader have a synthetic view of robotics’ story. In the second part, we develop our theory about human robots interactions. We will see how we can built a new framework, namely 6