Alternative Interfaces for Human-initiated Natural Language Communication and Robot-initiated Haptic Feedback: Towards Better Situational Awareness in Human-Robot Collaboration

This article presents an implementation of a natural-language speech interface and a haptic feedback interface that enables a human supervisor to provide guidance to, request information, and receive status updates from a Spot robot. We provide insights gained during preliminary user testing of the interface in a realistic robot exploration scenario.

Autonomous surveillance for biosecurity

The global movement of people and goods has increased the risk of biosecurity threats and their potential to incur large economic, social, and environmental costs. Conventional manual biosecurity surveillance methods are limited by their scalability in space and time. This article focuses on autonomous surveillance systems, comprising sensor networks, robots, and intelligent algorithms, and their applicability to biosecurity threats. We discuss the spatial and temporal attributes of autonomous surveillance technologies and map them to three broad categories of biosecurity threat: (i) vector-borne diseases; (ii) plant pests; and (iii) aquatic pests. Our discussion reveals a broad range of opportunities to serve biosecurity needs through autonomous surveillance.