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The process of developing theories and models and testing them with experiments is fundamental to the scientific method. Automating the entire scientific method then requires not only automation of the induction of theories from data, but…
To design trustworthy robots, we need to understand the impact factors of trust: people's attitudes, experience, and characteristics; the robot's physical design, reliability, and performance; a task's specification and the circumstances…
Humans inhabit a world defined by interactions -- with other humans, objects, and environments. These interactive movements not only convey our relationships with our surroundings but also demonstrate how we perceive and communicate with…
Human body motions can be captured as a high-dimensional continuous signal using motion sensor technologies. The resulting data can be surprisingly rich in information, even when captured from persons with limited mobility. In this work, we…
Within minutes of birth a newborn gnu or giraffe works to stand and walk, asserting postural balance and organised animate behaviour in an apparently goal-directed manner. In contrast, robots learning to stand and walk from scratch begin…
A critical bottleneck hindering further advancement in embodied AI and robotics is the challenge of scaling robot data. To address this, the field of learning robot manipulation skills from human video data has attracted rapidly growing…
Contemporary robots are increasingly mimicking human social behaviours to facilitate interaction, such as smiling to signal approachability, or hesitating before taking an action to allow people time to react. Such techniques can activate a…
Today's robots do not learn the general skills needed for such services as providing home care, being nursing assistants, or doing household chores. Addressing such aspirational goals requires improving how AIs and robots are created.…
As child-robot interactions become more and more common in daily life environment, it is important to examine how robot's errors influence children's behavior. We explored how a robot's unexpected behaviors affect child-robot interactions…
Advances in wearable robotics challenge the traditional definition of human motor systems, as wearable robots redefine body structure, movement capability, and perception of their own bodies. We measured gait performance and perceived body…
Parent-child interaction is critical for child development, yet parents may need guidance in some aspects of their engagement with their children. Current research on educational math robots focuses on child-robot interactions but falls…
Biological and robotic grasp and manipulation are undeniably similar at the level of mechanical task performance. However, their underlying fundamental biological vs. engineering mechanisms are, by definition, dramatically different and can…
Learning from Demonstrations, the field that proposes to learn robot behavior models from data, is gaining popularity with the emergence of deep generative models. Although the problem has been studied for years under names such as…
When designing a robot's internal system, one often makes assumptions about the structure of the intended environment of the robot. One may even assign meaning to various internal components of the robot in terms of expected environmental…
As robots become increasingly prominent in diverse industrial settings, the desire for an accessible and reliable system has correspondingly increased. Yet, the task of meaningfully assessing the feasibility of introducing a new robotic…
While fields like Artificial Life have made huge strides in quantifying the mechanisms that distinguish living systems from non-living ones, particular mechanisms remain difficult to reproduce in silico. Known as open-endedness, we've been…
The underlying physiological mechanisms of generating conscious states are still unknown. To make progress on the problem of consciousness, we will need to experimentally design a system that evolves in a similar way our brains do. Recent…
Infancy is characterized by rapid body growth and an explosive change of sensory and motor abilities. However, developmental robots and simulation platforms are typically designed in the image of a specific age, which limits their ability…
Successful human-robot teaming will require robots to adapt autonomously to a human teammate's internal state, where a critical element of such adaptation is the ability to estimate the human's workload in unknown situations. Existing…
Most evolutionary robotics studies focus on evolving some targeted behavior without taking the energy usage into account. This limits the practical value of such systems because energy efficiency is an important property for real-world…