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As robots increasingly operate in shared, safety critical environments, acting safely is no longer sufficient robots must also make their safety decisions intelligible to human collaborators. In human robot collaboration (HRC), behaviours…
When robots perform long action sequences, users will want to easily and reliably find out what they have done. We therefore demonstrate the task of learning to summarize and answer questions about a robot agent's past actions using natural…
Vision-language-action (VLA) models have emerged as generalist robotic controllers capable of mapping visual observations and natural language instructions to continuous action sequences. However, VLAs provide no calibrated measure of…
Living organisms interact with their surroundings in a closed-loop fashion, where sensory inputs dictate the initiation and termination of behaviours. Even simple animals are able to develop and execute complex plans, which has not yet been…
Robot failures in human-centered environments are inevitable. Therefore, the ability of robots to explain such failures is paramount for interacting with humans to increase trust and transparency. To achieve this skill, the main challenges…
Robotic manipulation research has investigated contact-rich problems and strategies that require robots to intentionally collide with their environment, to accomplish tasks that cannot be handled by traditional collision-free solutions. By…
Tactile perception is an essential ability of intelligent robots in interaction with their surrounding environments. This perception as an intermediate level acts between sensation and action and has to be defined properly to generate…
Robots are prone to making errors, which can negatively impact their credibility as teammates during collaborative tasks with human users. Detecting and recovering from these failures is crucial for maintaining effective level of trust from…
The motion of robots and objects in our world is often highly dependent upon contact. When contact is expected but does not occur or when contact is not expected but does occur, robot behavior diverges from plan, often disastrously. This…
A major component for developing intelligent and autonomous robots is a suitable knowledge representation, from which a robot can acquire knowledge about its actions or world. However, unlike humans, robots cannot creatively adapt to novel…
Detecting and adapting to catastrophic failures in robotic systems requires a robot to learn its new dynamics quickly and safely to best accomplish its goals. To address this challenging problem, we propose probabilistically-safe, online…
As social robots get more deeply integrated intoour everyday lives, they will be expected to engage in meaningful conversations and exhibit socio-emotionally intelligent listening behaviors when interacting with people. Active listening and…
Learned robot policies have consistently been shown to be versatile, but they typically have no built-in mechanism for handling the complexity of open environments, making them prone to execution failures; this implies that deploying…
Defining sound and complete specifications for robots using formal languages is challenging, while learning formal specifications directly from demonstrations can lead to over-constrained task policies. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian…
We present a semantically rich graph representation for indoor robotic navigation. Our graph representation encodes: semantic locations such as offices or corridors as nodes, and navigational behaviors such as enter office or cross a…
This paper presents INVIGORATE, a robot system that interacts with human through natural language and grasps a specified object in clutter. The objects may occlude, obstruct, or even stack on top of one another. INVIGORATE embodies several…
Designing robotic tasks for co-manipulation necessitates to exploit not only proprioceptive but also exteroceptive information for improved safety and autonomy. Following such instinct, this research proposes to formulate intuitive robotic…
This paper considers a scenario where a robot and a human operator share the same workspace, and the robot is able to both carry out autonomous tasks and physically interact with the human in order to achieve common goals. In this context,…
Domestic and service robots have the potential to transform industries such as health care and small-scale manufacturing, as well as the homes in which we live. However, due to the overwhelming variety of tasks these robots will be expected…
Understanding how humans evaluate robot behavior during human-robot interactions is crucial for developing socially aware robots that behave according to human expectations. While the traditional approach to capturing these evaluations is…