Receptionist [restructure][draft]

[moriarty]

Main Goal

All guests have been guided to the living room and their outerwear has been taken care of.

Setup

Guests are outside of the entrance, they arrive individually or in groups, some might have outerwear which shouldn't be worn inside the house.

OC Preparation

There should be some storage near the entrance: coat rack, umbrella bin, shoe rack etc.

[RemiFabre]

In the current version of the draft it says : "Sitting the female guest next to a male guest (100pts)" => To avoid randomly giving points to robots that managed this without doing it on purpose, robots should clearly state who is close to the pointed sitting location. Something like "You can sit here, next to Eric". Since this is harder, maybe we could increase the bonus points for doing it?

[kyordhel]

Nope. I don’t think so.

This feature might be removed to prevent enrage politically correctness inquisition, but if it stays:

1. It is there to make clear to the referees that the robot correctly guessed the gender of a person.
2. We must keep the test as simple as possible.

[justinhart]

I still think that this test doesn't really address HRI and really needs some re-working to be a concrete HRI thing.

[kyordhel]

It might be the case @justinhart, but thinking it needs reworking won't get the reworking done. We need proposals ASAP.

You can nominate someone if you wish.

[syedaraza]

An additional rule could say,

Help in opening the door: Request someone to open the door. The robot should point to the door knob.

• Robot finds a guest in the house and requests (50% pts).
• Robot requests the operator (25% pts).

This will improve the HRI and makes the task more accessible to the teams with less dexterous robots.

[justinhart]

Yeah, but I still don't really see these as HRI tasks. Finding the guest is sort of a face recognition thing, right? That seems like computer vision, and requesting the operator could be a simple as blurting out "I need an operator," right?

How about something like this. If we modified the "Farewell" task like follows, this would incorporate some of what I view as HRI elements. Maybe something similar could be injected into Receptionist.

1) Guests must wave, look-at, or otherwise non-verbally indicate to the robot that they are ready to leave.

2) If the guest engages in conversation with another guest, the robot must wait for the conversation to end. If it lasts for more than 1 minute, the robot should ask if the guest is ready to go and go help another guest if they are not. If not, the robot should resume helping the guest to leave.

[syedaraza]

I agree there is more room to improve HRI.

I think it should be the robot's choice how to find someone for the help in opening the door. For example, the robot can go to the living room and say if someone can help me in opening the door then please raise your hand or the robot goes to each guest one by one ask if they can help in opening the door. I don't think facial recognition would be a must in this case.

In any scenario, finding a guest to help open the door would be more difficult then simply asking the operator to open the door.

[kyordhel]

@syedaraza Unless very specific cases in which the robot must default to a set of 2~4 options, let's not pollute the rulebook with endless lists of discounts for every crazy idea teams may come up. Second, in tests we try to avoid percentages because they are confusing, so lets write the number of deducted points.

Deus Ex Machina reductions will be applied ad-hoc by the TC in most cases, specially when including certain amount of [shallow] HRI. I agree with you in that the robot must come out with a solution, ranging from using a tool, ask the operator to unlock the door by pushing the handle and completing the operation by itself, or have the operator open the door and then inform the robot this has been done with a QR code or a start button. Score reduction won't be the same, and never more than the proportional contribution of the subtask to achieve the goal.

Technically, we are allowing anything.

@justinhart Hold on your horses, man! The idea behind Deus Ex Machina is to make the test times easier by having a human assisting a robot with part of the task, hence reducing obtained score. We don't want to add a new dimension of complexity here (at least not now).

I agree this is at most shallow HRI, since the robot blindly asks for help. This is OK and we reduce scoring proportionally. We cannot expect robots to engage in a full dialog with a human while incorporating full sensorimotor integration to bypass manipulation. Remember that in @Home we traditionally consider as HRI any task involving a human, regardless on how trivial or naive it is. From this perspective, face recognition is HRI =/

For more complex interactions, let's design tests and set the interaction as main goal.

[awesomebytes]

We agreed on the meeting to just make it as gender neutral as possible. We need to remove references to female first.

[syedaraza]

@awesomebytes There is no obvious reference to female first.

There is a bonus reward saying, Sitting the female guest next to a male guest (100pts)

Do you mean this? To me it sounds fine.

[syedaraza]

A scoresheet PR is here https://github.com/RoboCupAtHome/RuleBook/pull/541#issue-250291447

[justinhart]

The point of the issue here is that you are seeking to seat men next to women, and the issue at hand is the gender identification in combination with the assertion that men and women would want to be seated together.

Again, this isn't an issue at the forefront of debate everywhere in the world, but in places it is.

[syedaraza]

I agree it can be problematic to some people.

How about this, robot offers all the empty seats in the room to the guest?

It will be a challenge specially when on some seats there is some stuff placed like a bag, a book, etc. which indicates the seat is pre-occupied.

[kyordhel]

Pufffff

Affordances sounds like big deal compared with gender recognition! This is evil, I like it.

But to not making overly complex, what about elders first or the oldest gets the sofa. That assuming we get some veterans as volunteers.

[syedaraza]

Priority seating sounds interesting too.

I was wondering how hard or easy it will be to find an elderly person in the competitions and keep him/her engaged during the tests. And he/she should be over ~60 otherwise priority seating does not justify.

Or the person should use a support to walk like a seat walker or a walking stick then it may qualify for a priority seating.

If offering all the empty seats sounds fine then I will try to write it as clearly and simply as possible and do a PR.

[kyordhel]

Look old is enough IMO. We really don’t care about the age of the person. I’ve seen people in their 80’s who look stronger than I, and people in their 50’s who look twice as old.

I wouldn’t advise someone with cane in Stage I. Gender/age/ethnicity/pose/style you can DNN-train, a cane can be confused with an umbrella and that’s a false positive we don’t want. A trolley would be nice but they are expensive.

[kyordhel]

@RoboCupAtHome/technical-commmittee Can we consider the Receptionist task as complete?

Can we close the issue?

[LoyVanBeek]

What could be clarified is how John is known to the robot beforehand. @moriarty ?

Otherwise, test seems fine to me :-)