Related papers: WHY: Natural Explanations from a Robot Navigator
We are interested in the design of autonomous robot behaviors that learn the preferences of users over continued interactions, with the goal of efficiently executing navigation behaviors in a way that the user expects. In this paper, we…
Language-guided robots must be able to both ask humans questions and understand answers. Much existing work focuses only on the latter. In this paper, we go beyond instruction following and introduce a two-agent task where one agent…
Object manipulation is a natural activity we perform every day. How humans handle objects can communicate not only the willfulness of the acting, or key aspects of the context where we operate, but also the properties of the objects…
When teams of robots collaborate to complete a task, communication is often necessary. Like humans, robot teammates should implicitly communicate through their actions: but interpreting our partner's actions is typically difficult, since a…
Natural language is an effective tool for communication, as information can be expressed in different ways and at different levels of complexity. Verbal commands, utilized for instructing robot tasks, can therefor replace traditional robot…
Traditional path-planning techniques treat humans as obstacles. This has changed since robots started to enter human environments. On modern robots, social navigation has become an important aspect of navigation systems. To use…
We present a unified framework which supports grounding natural-language semantics in robotic driving. This framework supports acquisition (learning grounded meanings of nouns and prepositions from human annotation of robotic driving…
In order to safely operate around humans, robots can employ predictive models of human motion. Unfortunately, these models cannot capture the full complexity of human behavior and necessarily introduce simplifying assumptions. As a result,…
To realize autonomous collaborative robots, it is important to increase the trust that users have in them. Toward this goal, this paper proposes an algorithm which endows an autonomous agent with the ability to explain the transition from…
This article presents an implementation of a natural-language speech interface and a haptic feedback interface that enables a human supervisor to provide guidance to, request information, and receive status updates from a Spot robot. We…
Autonomy and independent navigation are vital to daily life but remain challenging for individuals with blindness. Robotic systems can enhance mobility and confidence by providing intelligent navigation assistance. However, fully autonomous…
Robots are becoming increasingly omnipresent in our daily lives, supporting us and carrying out autonomous tasks. In Human-Robot Interaction, human actors benefit from understanding the robot's motion intent to avoid task failures and…
Real-life robot navigation involves more than just reaching a destination; it requires optimizing movements while addressing scenario-specific goals. An intuitive way for humans to express these goals is through abstract cues like verbal…
Some robots can interact with humans using natural language, and identify service requests through human-robot dialog. However, few robots are able to improve their language capabilities from this experience. In this paper, we develop a…
Voice-based communication is often cited as one of the most `natural' ways in which humans and robots might interact, and the recent availability of accurate automatic speech recognition and intelligible speech synthesis has enabled…
Humans interacting with robots often form predictions of what the robot will do next. For instance, based on the recent behavior of an autonomous car, a nearby human driver might predict that the car is going to remain in the same lane. It…
This paper presents a study on the development of an obstacle-avoidance navigation system for autonomous navigation in home environments. The system utilizes vision-based techniques and advanced path-planning algorithms to enable the robot…
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…
Making sense of incomplete and conflicting narrative knowledge in the presence of abnormalities, unobservable processes, and other real world considerations is a challenge and crucial requirement for cognitive robotics systems. An added…
We propose and demonstrate the task of giving natural language summaries of the actions of a robotic agent in a virtual environment. We explain why such a task is important, what makes it difficult, and discuss how it might be addressed. To…