Tag Archives: Elizabeth A. Croft

Café Scientifique (Vancouver, Canada) and human-robot collaboration on Feb. 23, 2016

On Tuesday, February 23, 2016 at 7:30 pm,  Café Scientifique, in the back room of The Railway Club (2nd floor of 579 Dunsmuir St. [at Seymour St.]), will be hosting a talk on human-robot collaboration (from the Feb. 3, 2016 announcement),

Our speaker for the evening will be Dr. Elizabeth A. Croft.  The title of her talk is:

Up Close and Personal with Human-Robot Collaboration

Advances in robot control, sensing and intelligence are rapidly expanding the potential for close-proximity human-robot collaborative work. In many different contexts, from manufacturing assembly to home care settings, a robot’s potential strength, precision and process knowledge can productively complement human perception, dexterity and intelligence to produce a highly coupled, coactive, human-robot team. Such interactions, however, require task-appropriate communication cues that allow each party to quickly share intentions and expectations around the task. These basic communication cues allow dyads, human-human or human-robot, to successfully and robustly pass objects, share spaces, avoid collisions and take turns – some of the basic building blocks of good, safe, and friendly collaboration regardless of one’s humanity. In this talk we will discuss approaches to identifying, characterizing, and implementing communicative cues and validating their impact in human-robot interaction scenarios.

Dr. Croft was featured here previously in a June 7, 2013 posting when she gave a talk titled, Transforming Human-Robot Interaction and again in a July 23, 2013 post about a gender workshop in engineering. Here’s an excerpt from Dr. Croft’s webpage on the University of British Columbia Faculty of Applied Science Engineering Dept. webspace,

Elizabeth Croft is Associate Dean, Education and Professional Development for the Faculty of Applied Science, director of the Collaborative Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Systems Lab, and a registered Professional Engineer in the Province of British Columbia. Her research investigates how robotic systems can operate efficiently and effectively in partnership with people, in a safe, predictable, and helpful manner. She is author of over 120 refereed publications in robotics, controls, visual servoing and human robot interaction. Applications of this work range from manufacturing assembly to healthcare and assistive technology and her work has been funded by industry partners including Thermo-CRS, General Motors and Hyundai Heavy Industries. She received a Peter Wall Early Career Scholar Award in 2001, and an NSERC Accelerator Award in 2007, and a YWCA Women of Distinction Award in 2013. She was named Fellow of Engineers Canada (2008) and of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (2009), and one of WXN’s top 100 most powerful women in Canada (2014).

Enjoy!