This book offers a broad perspective on the field of cognitive engineering and neuroergonomics, covering emerging practices and future trends toward the harmonious integration of human operators and computer systems. It presents novel theoretical findings on mental workload and stress, activity theory, human reliability, error and risk, and neuroergonomic measures alike, together with a wealth of cutting-edge applications. Further, the book describes key advances in our understanding of cognitive processes, including mechanisms of perception, memory, reasoning, and motor response, with a special emphasis on their role in interactions between humans and other elements of computer-based systems. Based on the AHFE 2018 affiliated conference on Neuroergonomics and Cognitive Engineering, held on July 21–25, 2018, in Orlando, Florida, USA, it provides readers with a comprehensive overview of the current challenges in cognitive computing and factors influencing human performance.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the First International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Robotics, ICR 2016, held in Budapest, Hungary, in August 2016.The 29 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions.

Gathering the Proceedings of the 2018 Intelligent Systems Conference (IntelliSys 2018), this book offers a remarkable collection of chapters covering a wide range of topics in intelligent systems and computing, and their real-world applications. The Conference attracted a total of 568 submissions from pioneering researchers, scientists, industrial engineers, and students from all around the world. These submissions underwent a double-blind peer review process, after which 194 (including 13 poster papers) were selected to be included in these proceedings. As intelligent systems continue to replace and sometimes outperform human intelligence in decision-making processes, they have made it possible to tackle many problems more effectively. This branching out of computational intelligence in several directions, and the use of intelligent systems in everyday applications, have created the need for such an international conference, which serves as a venue for reporting on cutting-edge innovations and developments. This book collects both theory and application-based chapters on all aspects of artificial intelligence, from classical to intelligent scope. Readers are sure to find the book both interesting and valuable, as it presents state-of-the-art intelligent methods and techniques for solving real-world problems, along with a vision of future research directions.

Presents a unified treatment of HRI-related issues, identifies key themes, and discusses challenge problems that are likely to shape the field in the near future. The survey includes research results from a cross section of the universities, government efforts, industry labs, and countries that contribute to HRI.

The current state of the art in cognitive robotics, covering the challenges of building AI-powered intelligent robots inspired by natural cognitive systems. A novel approach to building AI-powered intelligent robots takes inspiration from the way natural cognitive systems—in humans, animals, and biological systems—develop intelligence by exploiting the full power of interactions between body and brain, the physical and social environment in which they live, and phylogenetic, developmental, and learning dynamics. This volume reports on the current state of the art in cognitive robotics, offering the first comprehensive coverage of building robots inspired by natural cognitive systems. Contributors first provide a systematic definition of cognitive robotics and a history of developments in the field. They describe in detail five main approaches: developmental, neuro, evolutionary, swarm, and soft robotics. They go on to consider methodologies and concepts, treating topics that include commonly used cognitive robotics platforms and robot simulators, biomimetic skin as an example of a hardware-based approach, machine-learning methods, and cognitive architecture. Finally, they cover the behavioral and cognitive capabilities of a variety of models, experiments, and applications, looking at issues that range from intrinsic motivation and perception to robot consciousness. Cognitive Robotics is aimed at an interdisciplinary audience, balancing technical details and examples for the computational reader with theoretical and experimental findings for the empirical scientist.

Computational Human-Robot Interaction provides the reader with a systematic overview of the field of Human-Robot Interaction over the past decade, with a focus on the computational frameworks, algorithms, techniques, and models currently used to enable robots to interact with humans.

The vision of seamless human-robot interaction in our everyday life that allows for tight cooperation between human and robot has not become reality yet. However, the recent increase in technology maturity finally made it possible to realize systems of high integration, advanced sensorial capabilities and enhanced power to cross this barrier and merge living spaces of humans and robot workspaces to at least a certain extent. Together with the increasing industrial effort to realize first commercial service robotics products this makes it necessary to properly address one of the most fundamental questions of Human-Robot Interaction: How to ensure safety in human-robot coexistence? In this authoritative monograph, the essential question about the necessary requirements for a safe robot is addressed in depth and from various perspectives. The approach taken in this book focuses on the biomechanical level of injury assessment, addresses the physical evaluation of robot-human impacts, and isolates the major factors that cause human injuries. This assessment is the basis for the design and exploration of various measures to improve safety in human-robot interaction. They range from control schemes for collision detection, reflex reaction, and avoidance to the investigation of novel joint designs that equip robots with fundamentally new capabilities. By the depth of its analysis and exceptionally salient experimental work, this monograph offers one of the most comprehensive treatments of the safety challenge in the field.