Brittany Duncan, Ph.D.

Brittany Duncan, Ph.D.

Ross McCollum Associate Professor in the School of Computing at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Co-Director of the NIMBUS Lab

Talks and presentations

Teaching, Learning, Flying, and Interacting: computing as a pathway to your goals

April 08, 2022

Keynote Talk, Women in Science Conference, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Dr. Brittany Duncan, Associate Professor in the School of Computing and co-Director of the NIMBUS lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, will present on her path to academia, how her interests drove her research, and why you should consider computing careers in the future. Her research interests focus on how to enable flying robots to better interact with people in a variety of situations, ways in which flying robots can be improved to better interact with the world, and improving student success in computing degree programs. Dr. Duncan will discuss how serendipitous interactions and opportunities allow her to develop flying robots to help people accomplish their jobs in better, safer ways so that scientists can better monitor the environment.

Investigating Distancing and Communicative Flight Paths with small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

May 21, 2018

Invited Talk, ICRA 2018 Workshop on Human-Robot Interaction with UAVs: Challenges and Frontiers, Brisbane, Australia

In order to appropriately interact in public spaces, small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (sUAVs) will need to be able to approach people in safe, comfortable, and legible ways. This talk will focus on the distancing and communicative components of flight paths individually before considering the path forward to combine these investigations. Specific research questions that will be addressed are: 1) What is the appropriate distance for sUAV interaction, and how does this change based on the person, the vehicle, and the environment?, 2) How do naïve users interpret flight path changes and what similarities do they display when they create their own flight paths?, and 3) How can vehicle, environment, and robot application impact both the size and legibility of the flight paths? This discussion will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in field robotics and sUAV communities, as well as those in the fields of human factors, artificial intelligence, and the social sciences.

Human-Robot Interaction for High Performing Teams in Field Applications

February 15, 2018

Talk, PHENOME 2018, Tucson, AZ, USA

This talk will discuss the role of human-robot interaction in field-based robot deployments and be focused on three individual research areas: integration of robots into high performing teams, improved teleoperation, and necessary autonomy for improved team performance. Specific research questions that will be addressed include: 1) What role does the use of aerial vehicles play in shared decision making with high performing and potentially distributed teams? 2) How can interfaces and interactions amplify the current reach of the end users? and 3) What adaptations are necessary within the autonomy to augment user perceptions in field-based environments? This discussion will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in agriculture and robotics communities, as well as those in the fields of human factors, artificial intelligence, and the social sciences.

Human-Robot Interaction for the Wild

April 04, 2016

Talk, University of Illinois, Invited Seminar Speaker, Urbana, IL, USA

This talk will discuss the role of human-robot interaction for small and personal unmanned aerial vehicles in public spaces. Prior personal space studies involving humans and robots have found social similarities to the ways in which humans interact with one another, but these findings have been limited to ground-based vehicles. In this presentation, it will be argued that those results may not generalize to aerial vehicles, and that human-robot interactions for small flying robots could be quite different. This has significant implications as the personal-drone movement has resulted in an accelerated diffusion of flying robots into human-centric domains such as emergency response, manufacturing and delivery, and health and fitness. Specific research questions that will be addressed include: 1) What are the appropriate parameters for three-dimensional interaction models for co-located humans and robots? 2) What operational factors are important to consider and report when conducting field-based robotics experiments to better inform future human-robot interaction? 3) What role does improved human-robot interaction play in aiding individual and team decision-making among humans? This discussion will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in the robotics community, as well as those in the fields of civil and environmental engineering, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, and the social sciences.