Related papers: Online Robot Introspection via Wrench-based Action…

Robotic failure is all too common in unstructured robot tasks. Despite well designed controllers, robots often fail due to unexpected events. How do robots measure unexpected events? Many do not. Most robots are driven by the senseplan- act…

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…

Uncertainty is a major difficulty in endowing robots with autonomy. Robots often fail due to unexpected events. In robot contact tasks are often design to empirically look for force thresholds to define state transitions in a Markov chain…

Robots are increasingly entering uncertain and unstructured environments. Within these, robots are bound to face unexpected external disturbances like accidental human or tool collisions. Robots must develop the capacity to respond to…

Using natural language to give instructions to robots is challenging, since natural language understanding is still largely an open problem. In this paper we address this problem by restricting our attention to commands modeled as one…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit advanced reasoning skills, enabling robots to comprehend natural language instructions and strategically plan high-level actions through proper grounding. However, LLM hallucination may result in robots…

We address the problem of bootstrapping language acquisition for an artificial system similarly to what is observed in experiments with human infants. Our method works by associating meanings to words in manipulation tasks, as a robot…

Robot introspection, as opposed to anomaly detection typical in process monitoring, helps a robot understand what it is doing at all times. A robot should be able to identify its actions not only when failure or novelty occurs, but also as…

Perception algorithms that provide estimates of their uncertainty are crucial to the development of autonomous robots that can operate in challenging and uncontrolled environments. Such perception algorithms provide the means for having…

Robot manipulation is increasingly poised to interact with humans in co-shared workspaces. Despite increasingly robust manipulation and control algorithms, failure modes continue to exist whenever models do not capture the dynamics of the…

With the increasing presence of robotic systems and human-robot environments in today's society, understanding the reasoning behind actions taken by a robot is becoming more important. To increase this understanding, users are provided with…

Current robots are capable of computing plans to accomplish complex tasks. However, real-world environments are inherently open and dynamic, and unforeseen situations frequently arise during plan execution, such as jamming doors and fallen…

As robots aspire for long-term autonomous operations in complex dynamic environments, the ability to reliably take mission-critical decisions in ambiguous situations becomes critical. This motivates the need to build systems that have…

Deep reinforcement learning has been shown to solve challenging tasks where large amounts of training experience is available, usually obtained online while learning the task. Robotics is a significant potential application domain for many…

The increasing level of autonomy of robots poses challenges of trust and social acceptance, especially in human-robot interaction scenarios. This requires an interpretable implementation of robotic cognitive capabilities, possibly based on…

The ability to detect and analyze failed executions automatically is crucial for an explainable and robust robotic system. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning abilities on textual inputs. To leverage…

We propose a promising neural network model with which to acquire a grounded representation of robot actions and the linguistic descriptions thereof. Properly responding to various linguistic expressions, including polysemous words, is an…

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…

Autonomous robots deal with unexpected scenarios in real environments. Given input images, various visual perception tasks can be performed, e.g., semantic segmentation, depth estimation and normal estimation. These different tasks provide…

Multi-step manipulation tasks where robots interact with their environment and must apply process forces based on the perceived situation remain challenging to learn and prone to execution errors. Accurately simulating these tasks is also…