Related papers: Robot Contact Task State Estimation via Action Gra…
Humanoid robots dynamically navigate an environment by interacting with it via contact wrenches exerted at intermittent contact poses. Therefore, it is important to consider dynamics when planning a contact sequence. Traditional contact…
Leveraging human grasping skills to teach a robot to perform a manipulation task is appealing, but there are several limitations to this approach: time-inefficient data capture procedures, limited generalization of the data to other grasps…
A typical approach to creating complex robot behaviors is to compose atomic controllers, or skills, such that the resulting behavior satisfies a high-level task; however, when a task cannot be accomplished with a given set of skills, it is…
Humans can ground natural language commands to tasks at both abstract and fine-grained levels of specificity. For instance, a human forklift operator can be instructed to perform a high-level action, like "grab a pallet" or a low-level…
We propose a method for planning motion for robots with actuation uncertainty that incorporates contact with the environment and the compliance of the robot to reliably perform manipulation tasks. Our approach consists of two stages: (1)…
To perform household tasks, assistive robots receive commands in the form of user language instructions for tool manipulation. The initial stage involves selecting the intended tool (i.e., object grounding) and grasping it in a…
People employ expressive behaviors to effectively communicate and coordinate their actions with others, such as nodding to acknowledge a person glancing at them or saying "excuse me" to pass people in a busy corridor. We would like robots…
Complex robot behaviors are often structured as state machines, where states encapsulate actions and a transition function switches between states. Since transitions depend on physical parameters, when the environment changes, a roboticist…
Robots are soon going to be deployed in non-industrial environments. Before society can take such a step, it is necessary to endow complex robotic systems with mechanisms that make them reliable enough to operate in situations where the…
Human-to-human conversation is not just talking and listening. It is an incremental process where participants continually establish a common understanding to rule out misunderstandings. Current language understanding methods for…
In this work, we introduce a strategy that frames the sequential action selection problem for robots in terms of resolving \textit{blocking conditions}, i.e., situations that impede progress on an action en route to a goal. This strategy…
Continuum robots are flexible, thin manipulators capable of navigating confined or delicate environments making them well suited for surgical applications. Previous approaches to continuum robot state estimation typically rely on…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is effective in many robotic applications, but it requires extensive exploration of the state-action space, during which behaviors can be unsafe. This significantly limits its applicability to large robots with…
Stochastic communication delays in teleoperation introduce signal discontinuities that undermine control stability and degrade control performance. Consequently, the conventional reinforcement learning (RL) methods struggle with the delayed…
Physical human-robot interaction can improve human ergonomics, task efficiency, and the flexibility of automation, but often requires application-specific methods to detect human state and determine robot response. At the same time, many…
In this letter, we investigate learning forward dynamics models and multi-step prediction of state variables (long-term prediction) for contact-rich manipulation. The problems are formulated in the context of model-based reinforcement…
Humans naturally "program" a fellow collaborator to perform a task by demonstrating the task few times. It is intuitive, therefore, for a human to program a collaborative robot by demonstration and many paradigms use a single demonstration…
In this paper, we extended the method proposed in [21] to enable humans to interact naturally with autonomous agents through vocal and textual conversations. Our extended method exploits the inherent capabilities of pre-trained large…
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning algorithms have successfully been applied to temporal credit assignment problems with sparse reward signals. However, state-of-the-art algorithms require manual specification of sub-task structures, a…
In this survey, we present the current status on robots performing manipulation tasks that require varying contact with the environment, such that the robot must either implicitly or explicitly control the contact force with the environment…