ABC Robotics Seminar:
Are You Autonomous? Towards Designing Natural Interactions Between People and Drones
Lecturer: Dr. Jessica R. Cauchard
Dept. of Industrial Engineering and Management
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Abstract:
The increasing use of small-size drones is both exciting and frightening. The success and
acceptability of these automated vehicles will depend on how well they will be able to
communicate with users and passersby. How will people be able to make sense of a drone’s
intentions and abilities? How will drones respond to people in complex situations? In this talk, I
will discuss how we can leverage techniques at the intersection between technology and design
to build novel interaction techniques for collocated human-drone interaction. I will discuss several
methodologies that we have used successfully to understand user’s expectations. Using these
results, I will present a few technical solutions that we have implemented and evaluated in realworld
scenarios such as when building a drone tour guide for the Stanford campus.
Biography:
Dr. Jessica Cauchard is a lecturer in the department of Industrial Engineering and Management at
Ben Gurion University. Her research is rooted in the fields of Human-Computer and Human-Robot
Interaction with a focus on novel interaction techniques and ubiquitous computing. Previously,
she was faculty of Computer Science at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya between 2017 and
2019. Before moving to Israel, Dr. Cauchard worked as a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford
University. She has a strong interest in autonomous vehicles and intelligent devices and how they
change our device ecology. She completed her PhD at the University of Bristol, UK in Computer
Science and received a Magic Grant for her work on interacting with drones by the Brown Institute
for Media Innovation in 2015.
09:45 Coffee
10.00 -11.00 Lecture
