| NSF Org: |
BCS Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | August 3, 2020 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | August 3, 2020 |
| Award Number: | 2026658 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Betty Tuller
btuller@nsf.gov (703)292-7238 BCS Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences SBE Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2020 |
| End Date: | February 28, 2022 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $150,000.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $150,000.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
801 UNIVERSITY BLVD TUSCALOOSA AL US 35401 (205)348-5152 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
Tuscaloosa AL US 35486-0001 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | FW-HTF Futr Wrk Hum-Tech Frntr |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.075 |
ABSTRACT
In law enforcement, the stress of emergency-response scenarios can impede understanding of spoken messages and interpretation of other's emotional states. This can lead to potentially incorrect judgments with life or death consequences that can resonate throughout families, communities, and societies for years. To this end, robots have long provided safer alternatives to direct human interaction in hazardous scenarios, such as explosive ordinance disposal and surveillance. However, these are relatively special cases: A much greater share of police work relies on interpersonal communication where the development of mutual relationships, empathy, and trust are required. Unfortunately, modern remote technologies impede the necessary development of these trust relationships, reduce situational awareness, and disrupt communication between citizens and law enforcement. To protect the welfare of both officers and civilians in their mutual encounters, a transdisciplinary team of investigators are developing a prototype teleoperated social robot for use in hazardous operations involving public safety. The aim is to minimize dangers while increasing the quality of remote interpersonal communication, enabled by multimodal "presence" and communication through social robotics.
Activities performed during these early investigations will aim at developing stakeholder relations and performing iterative prototyping and design studies with local law enforcement training sites. The investigators will also address the research team composition, adding additional experts in the social, behavioral, technical, ethical, and legal domains. A central rationale of this research is that the use of force can be caused by misinformation, miscommunication, stress and time pressures in high-risk situations. It is expected that this initial research on a highly immersive, inexpensive, teleoperated social robots will generate knowledge on the risks, challenges, and requirements of human-robot partnerships and can facilitate transparent communication between law enforcement officers and the public in hazardous situations.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
This one-year project focused on the development and investigation of a nonweaponized, mobile, remote-controlled communication robot. The developed robot is capable of two-way audio/video communication using screens, microphones, and speakers, and is controlled using a computer. While the robot may be beneficial to numerous first responders, the study staff used the robot in conjunction with several law enforcement officers and agencies to investigate ways to de-escalate potentially dangerous situations using various communication strategies. Overall, the objective of this project was to collect sufficient preliminary data to motivate a more focused multi-year project in which a larger research team could more thoroughly investigate the role of communication robots in the future of law enforcement.
Over the course of this project, the team was able successfully accomplish its three goals of: 1) building a more complete research team, 2) developing stakeholder relations, and 3) using an iterative design to determine important robot features. Specifically, the original research team formed an expanded research team consisting of experts in computer science, social justice, communication, ethics, mechanical engineering, and human-robot interaction. Additionally, the team partnered with numerous law enforcement agencies and experts in community relations to balance the wants and needs of private citizens and law enforcement officers as they pertain to communication robots, privacy, and ethics. Moreover, by iteratively working with law enforcement officers and agencies, the team was able to determine features and aspects of the communication robot that are vital to communication.
While working with law enforcement officers, the team provided officers with required Continuing Education hours by training them in communication modalities including nonverbal communication, intercultural communication, and mediated communication. The research team also trained the officers in the basics of robotics and collected survey data to capture their attitudes and thoughts pertaining to communication and communication robots. After analysis, the data showed that as the officers became more familiar with robots, they viewed the communication robot more positively. The results also suggest that further research into communication robots is warranted, especially in law enforcement. During focus group sessions, the team determined that officers were receptive to using robots as communication tools and officers provided numerous suggestions to best design the robot with the general public in mind. Data collected by the research team has been published in multiple venues and the team is working to more widely disseminate the results to international audiences.
This project focused primarily on the perspectives of law enforcement, however, the team notes that because the general public will ultimately be affected by the potential inclusion of communication robots in law enforcement, the views and opinions of the public should be analyzed and incorporated prior to deploying any communication robots. Hence, one of the primary thrusts of the team’s proposed future work is to analyze how the public perceives robots in law enforcement and how factors such as privacy, ethics, law, and safety should be addressed.
Last Modified: 05/16/2022
Modified by: Nader Jalili
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