ACRL students Thiago Marinho and Venanzio Cichella together with Professor Hovakimyan and Professor Wang, were awarded the Focal Point Grant by the College of Engineering to pursue the NICER Robotics Project. Together with the students Kasey Ackerman and Ishaan Pakrasi the team envisions to develop an idea of social etiquette in cooperative robotic systems comprised of humans and non-anthropomorphic robots, through the study of human behavior.
NICER stands for Non Intrusive, Cooperative, Empathetic and Robust Robotics. This project aims to to create guidance and control algorithms to improve the acceptability of aerial robots in essential social environments by identifying factors that influence people’s perception of safety and comfort. The experimental setup to interact with human subjects will be a Virtual Reality Environment developed in cooperation with Camille Goudeseune from the Beckman Insitute.