Supervisory Team

Jared Donovan

Markus Rittenbruch

Project based at

Lead Partner Organisation

“Spot, what’s happening?” Explaining a robot’s state through language

Collaborative human-robot teams are increasingly being used for a variety of tasks. When working with robots, humans sometimes need to understand what the robot is currently doing, why and how it got to that state, and how it interprets its environment. This is important for the human operator to ensure the robot is working according to plans and particularly important if the human needs to intervene or react when the robot needs help.  This is referred to as “situation awareness”.

The goal of this project is to investigate how to process logs of raw information coming from the robot to present to the human operator an appropriate and relevant summary.  The project will combine natural language processing (and using large language models), robotics and user-centred design.

This project addresses Dynamic Situation Awareness and Human-AI Communication, two of the foundational research questions being addressed in the Collaborative Intelligence research programme at CSIRO CINTEL. The project also fits into a collaboration between CINTEL and the Australian Cobotic Centre’s research on Human-Robot Interaction.