Related papers: Learning Human Behaviors for Robot-Assisted Dressi…

Assistive robotic arms enable users with physical disabilities to perform everyday tasks without relying on a caregiver. Unfortunately, the very dexterity that makes these arms useful also makes them challenging to teleoperate: the robot…

Assistive agents should make humans' lives easier. Classically, such assistance is studied through the lens of inverse reinforcement learning, where an assistive agent (e.g., a chatbot, a robot) infers a human's intention and then selects…

Robots are good at performing repetitive tasks in modern manufacturing industries. However, robot motions are mostly planned and preprogrammed with a notable lack of adaptivity to task changes. Even for slightly changed tasks, the whole…

Handing objects to humans is an essential capability for collaborative robots. Previous research works on human-robot handovers focus on facilitating the performance of the human partner and possibly minimising the physical effort needed to…

Learning to manipulate cloth is both a paradigmatic problem for robotic research and a problem of immediate relevance to a variety of applications ranging from assistive care to the service industry. The complex physics of the deformable…

Robot-to-human object handover is an essential skill for robot assistants, from serving drinks at home to passing surgical tools in the operating room. We expect robots to perform handover robustly -- to release the object only after a firm…

Vision-based robotic cloth unfolding has made great progress recently. However, prior works predominantly rely on value learning and have not fully explored policy-based techniques. Recently, the success of reinforcement learning on the…

Robot assistants for older adults and people with disabilities need to interact with their users in collaborative tasks. The core component of these systems is an interaction manager whose job is to observe and assess the task, and infer…

In this paper we present a Deep Reinforcement Learning approach to solve dynamic cloth manipulation tasks. Differing from the case of rigid objects, we stress that the followed trajectory (including speed and acceleration) has a decisive…

Real-time collaboration with humans poses challenges due to the different behavior patterns of humans resulting from diverse physical constraints. Existing works typically focus on learning safety constraints for collaboration, or how to…

This paper explores a novel approach to model strategies for flattening wrinkled cloth learning from humans. A human participant study was conducted where the participants were presented with various wrinkle types and tasked with flattening…

We present an assistance system that reasons about a human's intended actions during robot teleoperation in order to provide appropriate corrections for unintended behavior. We model the human's physical interaction with a control interface…

Cloth folding is a widespread domestic task that is seemingly performed by humans but which is highly challenging for autonomous robots to execute due to the highly deformable nature of textiles; It is hard to engineer and learn…

Compliant and soft hands have gained a lot of attention in the past decade because of their ability to adapt to the shape of the objects, increasing their effectiveness for grasping. However, when it comes to grasping highly flexible…

Robots are increasingly working alongside people, delivering food to patrons in restaurants or helping workers on assembly lines. These scenarios often involve object handovers between the person and the robot. To achieve safe and efficient…

Imitation can allow us to quickly gain an understanding of a new task. Through a demonstration, we can gain direct knowledge about which actions need to be performed and which goals they have. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to…

The ability to learn from human demonstration endows robots with the ability to automate various tasks. However, directly learning from human demonstration is challenging since the structure of the human hand can be very different from the…

Assistive robot arms can help humans by partially automating their desired tasks. Consider an adult with motor impairments controlling an assistive robot arm to eat dinner. The robot can reduce the number of human inputs -- and how precise…

Fabric manipulation is a long-standing challenge in robotics due to the enormous state space and complex dynamics. Learning approaches stand out as promising for this domain as they allow us to learn behaviours directly from data. Most…

Manipulation of deformable objects, such as ropes and cloth, is an important but challenging problem in robotics. We present a learning-based system where a robot takes as input a sequence of images of a human manipulating a rope from an…