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Unit 1: HRI Fundamentals and Models
HRI paradigms (physical, teleoperation, shared autonomy), Levels of autonomy (SAE 0-5 for robotics), Cognitive models (NASA TLX workload, Situation Awareness), Trust in automation (Lee & See model), Uncanny valley effect, Robot appearance (anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, functional), Social robot design principles.
02
Unit 2: Natural User Interfaces
Multimodal interaction (speech, gesture, gaze, haptics), Speech recognition (ASR: HMM, end-to-end DNNs), Natural Language Understanding (NLU: intent classification, slot filling), Dialogue management (POMDP, rule-based), Gesture recognition (MediaPipe, OpenPose), Gaze estimation and attention modeling.
03
Unit 3: Social and Affective HRI
Emotion recognition (facial FER, physiological signals: EDA, HRV), Expressive behavior generation (gesture timing, facial animation), Rapport building strategies, Theory of Mind in robots, Personalization and user modeling, Cultural adaptation in HRI, Ethical considerations (deception, privacy, attachment).
04
Unit 4: Shared Autonomy and Assistive Robotics
HRI in manipulation (shared control, intent prediction), Haptic feedback and teleoperation (passivity-based control), Assistive technologies (exoskeletons, wheelchairs), Legibility and predictability in motion, Human-aware navigation (social costs, pedestrian avoidance), Safety standards (ISO 13482, UL 1740).
05
Unit 5: HRI Evaluation and Applications
Experimental design (within/between subjects, counterbalancing), Metrics (success rate, time-to-task, user satisfaction SUS/NASA-TLX), Field vs. lab studies, HRI in domains (healthcare, education, manufacturing, service robots), Emerging trends (AR/VR HRI, brain-computer interfaces), Accessibility and inclusive design.