Academic Work

This thread of work highlights some of the experimental results which will become part of my PhD thesis, which is currently ongoing. I am investigating handheld robots that require the user to assist them in completing a task, often called shared control. Handheld robots are those that do not have any locomotive ability themselves, and rely on the user to provide this function. The robot brings precision and task-progress tracking to the system.

In order to share control effectively the user must know the progress of the given task, and as such I have conducted studies using Augmented Reality (AR) to provide this information in real time to the user in a manner that is intuitive to understand. A hand-held robot with dense visual feedback and a shared control scheme for actuation forms a very tightly coupled human-robot interaction, the interaction of these factors and how to manage them is the core theme of my research.

Below is a summary of my academic work to peer reviewed destinations, for further details, see the papers themselves or view the associated videos.

• J. Elsdon and Y. Demiris, “Augmented Reality Instructions for Shared Control of Hand-held Robotic Systems,” in 2018 international conference on robotics and automation (icra). workshop: robotics in virtual reality, 2018.
  [Bibtex]

  @inproceedings{Elsdon2018a,
  author = {Elsdon, Joshua and Demiris, Yiannis},
  booktitle = {2018 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). Workshop: Robotics in Virtual Reality},
  title = {{Augmented Reality Instructions for Shared Control of Hand-held Robotic Systems}},
  year = {2018}
  }

• M. Zolotas, J. Elsdon, and Y. Demiris, “Head-Mounted Augmented Reality for Explainable Robotic Wheelchair Assistance,” in 2018 ieee/rsj international conference on intelligent robots and systems (iros), 2018, p. in press.
  [Bibtex]

  @inproceedings{Zolotas,
  author = {Zolotas, Mark and Elsdon, Joshua and Demiris, Yiannis},
  booktitle = {2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
  pages = {in press},
  publisher = {IEEE},
  title = {{Head-Mounted Augmented Reality for Explainable Robotic Wheelchair Assistance}},
  year = {2018}
  }

• J. Elsdon and Y. Demiris, “Augmented Reality for Feedback in a Shared Control Spraying Task,” in 2018 international conference on robotics and automation (icra), 2018, p. 1939–1946.
  [Bibtex]

  @inproceedings{Elsdon2018,
  author = {Elsdon, Joshua and Demiris, Yiannis},
  booktitle = {2018 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  pages = {1939--1946},
  publisher = {IEEE},
  title = {{Augmented Reality for Feedback in a Shared Control Spraying Task}},
  year = {2018}
  }

• J. Elsdon and Y. Demiris, “Assisted painting of 3D structures using shared control with a hand-held robot,” in 2017 ieee international conference on robotics and automation (icra), 2017, p. 4891–4897.
  [Bibtex]

  @inproceedings{Elsdon2017,
  author = {Elsdon, Joshua and Demiris, Yiannis},
  booktitle = {2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  doi = {10.1109/ICRA.2017.7989566},
  isbn = {978-1-5090-4633-1},
  month = {may},
  pages = {4891--4897},
  publisher = {IEEE},
  title = {{Assisted painting of 3D structures using shared control with a hand-held robot}},
  url = {http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7989566/},
  year = {2017}
  }

Non-academic

I have also attracted some interest in my hobby work, specifically in the ‘urobots’ project that I have conducted with Dr Thomas Branch. The magazine article took the form of a question and answer interview regarding the project and it’s technical details. This article was aimed at an audience of Linux users to encourage them to consider using ROS (Robotic Operating System), which is the industry standard for research robotics.

• C. Thornett and J. Elsdon, “Micro robots,” Linux user & developer, p. Issue 186:p72–73, 2017.
  [Bibtex]

  @article{Unlisted2017,
  author = {Thornett, Chris and Elsdon, Joshua},
  journal = {Linux User & Developer},
  month = {dec},
  pages = {Issue 186:p72--73},
  title = {{Micro robots}},
  year = {2017}
  }

Below is a playlist of un-edited videos showing these robots.