Jean Scholtz

Dr. Jean Scholtz has been interested in human-robot interaction since 2000, when she funded some exploratory work at DARPA. This included a DARPA/NSF interdisciplinary workshop that identified challenges for HRI. At NIST, Dr. Scholtz has worked with the Manufacturing Laboratory to include evaluations of HRI in the typical performance based evaluations.

In 2004, Dr. Scholtz taught Human-robot Interaction at the IEEE-RAS/IFRR School of Robotic Science in Volterra, Italy. She also conducted the Human-robot interaction portion of the developmental camp at the Istituto Superiore Antincendi, Rome , Italy.hosted by the RoboCupRescue Robot League.

Dr. Scholtz has given tutorials on HRI at the Computer Human Interaction conferences in 2004 and 2005. Dr. Scholtz is working on projects to identify evaluation standards for Urban Search and Rescue and Explosive Ordnance Disposal. She has also worked on an ad-hoc government committee to define autonomy levels for unmanned systems (ALFUS).

Dr. Scholtz has participated in several USAR exercises arranged by Dr. Robin Murphy at the University of South Florida ’s Center for Robot Assisted Search and Rescue. Dr. Scholtz brings her knowledge of human-computer interaction to bear on this field.

Mary Frances Theofanos has been interested in robotics since 1983, when she worked for General Electric’s Robotics and Vision Systems Laboratory. At GE she was responsible for developing and implementing motion algorithms for arm processing control on the RC2000 robot controller. This effort included a patent application as co-inventor for Joint Trajectory Interpolation for Robotics. At NIST, Ms. Theofanos has focused on evaluating human-robot interactions.

Brian Antonishek has been involved with user interface development and programming since 1990 and has developed various applications dealing with scientific visualization, 3D virtual worlds, streaming video, and various input devices. More recently, at NIST, Mr. Antonishek has been involved with human-robot interaction (HRI). This work has been focused in the areas of autonmous vehicles, urban search and rescue (USAR), and explosive ordnance disposal (EOD).