PhD student Resul Dagdanov joined the Research Café to discuss his team’s research into human robot interactions. The team led by Distinguished Professor Dikai Liu, Director of the ARC Research Hub for Human-Robot Teaming for Sustainable and Resilient Construction and the Co-Director of the Centre for Autonomous System, recently took part in a cross-faculty collaboration to address the question; what are the barriers to and enablers for accepting new technology in a world of AI?
Building trust in human-robot collaboration
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PhD student Resul Dagdanov speaking at Research Café
“With technology getting more advanced and the rate of change becoming faster and faster, the human pace of accepting those technologies is becoming slower,” Resul said, adding that the gap between advancements in technology and the pace of acceptance is getting wider.
“This creates the problem of how we can create a technology that can be easily accepted by people.”
Driving cross-faculty collaboration
Working with the between the UTS Faculty of Health, the UTS Business School and the UTS Faculty of Engineering and IT, the team now seeks to create solutions to the problem of humans’ acceptance of new technology.
Resul’s team provided the robotics technology and AI, the UTS Business School provided knowledge of human behaviour and human indicators which informed the creation of the technology, and the UTS Faculty of Health provided the challenge of applying technology to healthcare settings.
With technology getting more advanced and the rate of change becoming faster and faster, the human pace of accepting those technologies is becoming slower.
By way of example, Resul explained how there is a shortage of nurses in Australia. One of the main problems in healthcare is moving immobile patients, a task that requires two to three nurses to operate a hoist to move a patient when they want to go to the bathroom or move to a chair.
“This is not efficient. Our solution is to figure out how just one nurse and one robot can work together to streamline this process,” he said.
The team has integrated AI into a robot and recently conducted experiments with nursing students in the robotics lab to analyse human behaviour and how they interact with this new technology.
Technologies should address human needs, and we affirm this by putting people first as we collaborate with multiple disciplines at UTS.
Now in discussion with Business School researchers and Faculty of Health researchers, the team are using this research to address the problem of how humans accept technology.
Resul said that the future is moving towards the Fifth Industrial Revolution where technologies become human-centric.
“Technologies should address human needs, and we affirm this by putting people first as we collaborate with multiple disciplines at UTS.”
About Resul
A PhD candidate, Resul is a researcher with an academic and professional background in aerospace engineering and autonomous systems. He is part of a research group led by Distinguished Professor Dikai Liu that aims to close the gap between the rapid progress of robotics and AI and the slower rate of human acceptance. Taking a human-centric approach and working with researchers from health, business and engineering, Resul explores how people and robots can work together in areas such as healthcare, construction and infrastructure.