Related papers: WHY: Natural Explanations from a Robot Navigator

As the complexity of multi-robot systems grows to incorporate a greater number of robots, more complex tasks, and longer time horizons, the solutions to such problems often become too complex to be fully intelligible to human users. In this…

In situations such as habitat construction, station inspection, or cooperative exploration, incorrect assumptions about the environment or task across the team could lead to mission failure. Thus it is important to resolve any ambiguity…

The explainability of a robot's actions is crucial to its acceptance in social spaces. Explaining why a robot fails to complete a given task is particularly important for non-expert users to be aware of the robot's capabilities and…

A robot's ability to understand or ground natural language instructions is fundamentally tied to its knowledge about the surrounding world. We present an approach to grounding natural language utterances in the context of factual…

"Natural Language," whether spoken and attended to by humans, or processed and generated by computers, requires networked structures that reflect creative processes in semantic, syntactic, phonetic, linguistic, social, emotional, and…

Black box neural networks are an indispensable part of modern robots. Nevertheless, deploying such high-stakes systems in real-world scenarios poses significant challenges when the stakeholders, such as engineers and legislative bodies,…

Robots are required to execute increasingly complex instructions in dynamic environments, which can lead to a disconnect between the user's intent and the robot's representation of the instructions. In this paper we present a natural…

Intelligent robots and machines are becoming pervasive in human populated environments. A desirable capability of these agents is to respond to goal-oriented commands by autonomously constructing task plans. However, such autonomy can add…

While there are many examples in which robots provide social assistance, a lack of theory on how the robots should decide how to assist impedes progress in realizing these technologies. To address this deficiency, we propose a pair of…

In human-robot interactions, human and robot agents maintain internal mental models of their environment, their shared task, and each other. The accuracy of these representations depends on each agent's ability to perform theory of mind,…

A fruitful collaboration is based on the mutual knowledge of each other skills and on the possibility of communicating their own limits and proposing alternatives to adapt the execution of a task to the capabilities of the collaborators.…

Robot-assisted navigation is a perfect example of a class of applications requiring flexible control approaches. When the human is reliable, the robot should concede space to their initiative. When the human makes inappropriate choices the…

Increased robot deployment, such as in warehousing, has revealed a need for collaboration among heterogeneous robot teams to resolve unforeseen conflicts. To this end, we propose a peer-to-peer coordination protocol that enables robots to…

Humanoid robots, with their human-like embodiment, have the potential to integrate seamlessly into human environments. Critical to their coexistence and cooperation with humans is the ability to understand natural language communications…

Humans have a rich representation of the entities in their environment. Entities are described by their attributes, and entities that share attributes are often semantically related. For example, if two books have "Natural Language…

Enabling robots to understand instructions provided via spoken natural language would facilitate interaction between robots and people in a variety of settings in homes and workplaces. However, natural language instructions are often…

This paper presents a research platform that supports spoken dialogue interaction with multiple robots. The demonstration showcases our crafted MultiBot testing scenario in which users can verbally issue search, navigate, and follow…

When humans design cost or goal specifications for robots, they often produce specifications that are ambiguous, underspecified, or beyond planners' ability to solve. In these cases, corrections provide a valuable tool for human-in-the-loop…

The new industrial settings are characterized by the presence of human and robots that work in close proximity, cooperating in performing the required job. Such a collaboration, however, requires to pay attention to many aspects. Firstly,…

For robots to seamlessly interact with humans, we first need to make sure that humans and robots understand one another. Diverse algorithms have been developed to enable robots to learn from humans (i.e., transferring information from…