This research study scopes the ethical implications associated with the deployment of social robots within workplace environments, in the context of an increased need of employee wellbeing. Progress in the domains of artificial intelligence (AI) and social robotics present a potential avenue for improving workplace wellbeing. However, it is necessary conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the impacts and ethical considerations associated with these emerging technologies. For this purpose, we carried out an ethical risk assessment for a telepresence robot programmed to function as a social robot in the workplace, which we named ’Cheerbot’. After introducing Cheerbot’s functions, the paper describes an ethical risk assessment process, which involves identifying potential hazards, the likelihood of the hazard occurring, potential consequences (harms), and a risk exposure rating for each hazard. Results are presented for three hypothetical scenarios, and potential mitigations for the highest rated risks are suggested. The findings highlight the value of proactively identifying and mitigating ethical risks from harms, ensuring responsible deployment of robotics aimed at supporting workplace wellbeing.

This paper proposes a control framework based on auditory perception. Generally, in robot audition, the motion control of a robot from the sense of hearing relies on sound source localization. We propose in this paper an alternative approach, aural servo, which is derived from the sensor-based control framework. In this approach, robot motions are directly connected to the aural perception: The variation of low-level auditory features dictates the motions applied to the robot through a feedback loop. It has the advantage of being robust to spurious measurements and modeling approximations for a low computational cost. This paper presents the theoretical concept of the aural servo framework. Besides a theoretical analysis, the aural servo framework is validated through several experiments on different robotic platforms and under real-world conditions.

This paper validates experimentally a novel approach to robot audition, sound-based control, which consists in introducing auditory features directly as inputs of a closed-loop control scheme, that is, without any explicit localization process. The applications we present rely on the implicit bearings of the sound sources computed from the time difference of arrival (TDOA) between two microphones. By linking the motion of the robot to the aural perception of the environment, this approach has the benefit of being more robust to reverberation and noise. Therefore neither complex tracking method such as Kalman filtering nor TDOA enhancement with denoising or dereverberation methods are needed to track the correct TDOA measurements. The experiments conducted on a mobile robot instrumented with a pair of microphones show the validity of our approach. In a reverberating and noisy room, this approach is able to orient the robot to a mobile sound source in real time. A positioning task with respect to two sound sources is also performed while the robot perception is disturbed by altered and spurious TDOA measurements.

This paper is a follow-up way to our previous works regarding audio-based control, that is an alternative method for auditory-based robot tasks. Conversely to classic methods oriented towards sound source localization, audio-based control is a sensor-based framework that does not localize the sound source. Instead, auditory features are used as inputs of a closed-loop control scheme. The audio-based control method presented in this paper relies on the sound signal energy measured by two microphones. By combining the interchannel level difference to the acoustic absolute energy level, the control scheme allows positioning the robot with respect to the sound source at a given distance and orientation. Moreover this method has the benefit of a low computation cost, since it only relies on the signal energy measurement. Experimental results conducted on a mobile robot validate the relevance and the robustness of this approach in dynamic and real world conditions.

This paper presents a novel approach to robot audition by performing robotic tasks with auditory cues. Unlike many previous works, we propose a control scheme, that does not require any explicit sound source localization. This approach is capable of controlling all the three degrees of freedom in a plane from two microphones. Built upon the sensor-based control framework, this approach relies on implicit sound source direction obtained from the time difference of arrival (TDOA). We introduce an analytical modelling of auditory cues considering a robot equipped with a pair of microphones and multiple sound sources, from which a control scheme is designed. A stability analysis is provided as well. The results obtained in simulation show the feasibility and the suitability of this method even in reverberant area.