alex specific goals

Specific Goals

My primary concern for this summer is to, at a minimum, complete the work for and assist in writing a paper to be published on the relationship between operator performance and the effective protection of privacy in teleoperated robotics. What does that even mean? Supposing there is a robot being controlled by another human in your house or work environment, there are probably certain things you don't want that remote user to see. Specifically let's suppose a plumber is remote controlling a small robot in your household and can see what it sees. The plumber's primary intent is to examine the pipes below your kitchen sink so she knows what tools to bring to your house later. Perhaps you are a huge Twilight fan and have posters and books decorating your kitchen, but you're not interested in the remote user knowing this. In your interest we may want to make sure the robot cannot see these things. However, hidden in this quest are many small problems, such as but not limited to: how does the robot know where itself and the poster are at? What is the best method to hide the Twilight poster? Will the protection of your privacy interfere with the plumber doing her job? this final question lends itself to my goals for this summer:

• Design a user study measuring the effect of privacy protection on operator performance.
• Conduct the user study and collect relevant data.
• Develop a statistical approach to determine the independence our two variables.
• Summarize these results in a paper to be published.

At a minimum, I hope to have aided in getting this paper published by the end of my time here. This is important to me because this is the cumulation of my efforts at Oregon State University last summer and this summer. As some might argue, if it's not published, it didn't happen -- so getting published is important for this research experience. Following the completion of this paper I hope to improve the experiment design as a whole and find further ways of answering and exploring our questions. Some further goals are listed below.

• Implement digital filters (as opposed to the physical filters to be described in the upcoming approach section).
• Develop alternative methods for and improve robotic indoor navigation to be accurate enough for the digital filters to work effectively.
• Theorize and implement an effective user interface for end-users to easily and intuitively specify what and how they want their privacy protected.
• Explore not only visual privacy but physical privacy -- i.e, controlling where a teleoperated robot can and cannot go.