Related papers: Programming by Demonstration with User-Specified P…
A robot operating in a real-world environment needs to perform reasoning over a variety of sensor modalities such as vision, language and motion trajectories. However, it is extremely challenging to manually design features relating such…
Effective human-robot interaction, such as in robot learning from human demonstration, requires the learning agent to be able to ground abstract concepts (such as those contained within instructions) in a corresponding high-dimensional…
Deep neural networks can model images with rich latent representations, but they cannot naturally conceptualize structures of object categories in a human-perceptible way. This paper addresses the problem of learning object structures in an…
Learning for Demonstration (LfD) enables robots to acquire new skills by imitating expert demonstrations, allowing users to communicate their instructions in an intuitive manner. Recent progress in LfD often relies on kinesthetic teaching…
Learning from demonstration is an effective method for human users to instruct desired robot behaviour. However, for most non-trivial tasks of practical interest, efficient learning from demonstration depends crucially on inductive bias in…
Landmark-based robot self-localization has recently garnered interest as a highly-compressive domain-invariant approach for performing visual place recognition (VPR) across domains (e.g., time of day, weather, and season). However,…
Learning from demonstration (LfD) has the potential to greatly increase the applicability of robotic manipulators in modern industrial applications. Recent progress in LfD methods have put more emphasis in learning robustness than in…
The ability to display rich facial expressions is crucial for human-like robotic heads. While manually defining such expressions is intricate, there already exist approaches to automatically learn them. In this work one such approach is…
As robots begin to cohabit with humans in semi-structured environments, the need arises to understand instructions involving rich variability---for instance, learning to ground symbols in the physical world. Realistically, this task must…
State estimation from measured data is crucial for robotic applications as autonomous systems rely on sensors to capture the motion and localize in the 3D world. Among sensors that are designed for measuring a robot's pose, or for soft…
Even as deep neural networks have become very effective for tasks in vision and perception, it remains difficult to explain and debug their behavior. In this paper, we present a programmatic and semantic approach to explaining,…
Learning from Demonstration (LfD) offers a promising paradigm for robot skill acquisition. Recent approaches attempt to extract manipulation commands directly from video demonstrations, yet face two critical challenges: (1) general video…
Robotic control tasks are often first run in simulation for the purposes of verification, debugging and data augmentation. Many methods exist to specify what task a robot must complete, but few exist to specify what range of environments a…
A commercial robot, trained by its manufacturer to recognize a predefined number and type of objects, might be used in many settings, that will in general differ in their illumination conditions, background, type and degree of clutter, and…
Language is an effective medium for bi-directional communication in human-robot teams. To infer the meaning of many instructions, robots need to construct a model of their surroundings that describe the spatial, semantic, and metric…
Autonomous agents embedded in a physical environment need the ability to recognize objects and their properties from sensory data. Such a perceptual ability is often implemented by supervised machine learning models, which are pre-trained…
Successful human-robot cooperation hinges on each agent's ability to process and exchange information about the shared environment and the task at hand. Human communication is primarily based on symbolic abstractions of object properties,…
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a critical technology that enables autonomous robots to be aware of their surrounding environment. With the development of deep learning, SLAM systems can achieve a higher level of perception…
Humans effortlessly "program" one another by communicating goals and desires in natural language. In contrast, humans program robotic behaviours by indicating desired object locations and poses to be achieved, by providing RGB images of…
We present a novel Learning from Demonstration (LfD) method, Deformable Manipulation from Demonstrations (DMfD), to solve deformable manipulation tasks using states or images as inputs, given expert demonstrations. Our method uses…