Related papers: What Can This Robot Do? Learning from Appearance a…

Many functional elements of human homes and workplaces consist of rigid components which are connected through one or more sliding or rotating linkages. Examples include doors and drawers of cabinets and appliances; laptops; and swivel…

Humans can leverage physical interaction to teach robot arms. This physical interaction takes multiple forms depending on the task, the user, and what the robot has learned so far. State-of-the-art approaches focus on learning from a single…

Humans and animals are capable of learning a new behavior by observing others perform the skill just once. We consider the problem of allowing a robot to do the same -- learning from a raw video pixels of a human, even when there is…

A generalist robot equipped with learned skills must be able to perform many tasks in many different environments. However, zero-shot generalization to new settings is not always possible. When the robot encounters a new environment or…

We present a framework for learning human user models from joint-action demonstrations that enables the robot to compute a robust policy for a collaborative task with a human. The learning takes place completely automatically, without any…

Today's robots attempt to learn new tasks by imitating human examples. These robots watch the human complete the task, and then try to match the actions taken by the human expert. However, this standard approach to visual imitation learning…

Contemporary robots have become exceptionally skilled at achieving specific tasks in structured environments. However, they often fail when faced with the limitless permutations of real-world unstructured environments. This motivates…

Humanoid robots can benefit from their similarity to the human shape by learning from humans. When humans teach other humans how to perform actions, they often demonstrate the actions, and the learning human imitates the demonstration to…

Humans are very effective at interpreting subtle properties of the partner's movement and use this skill to promote smooth interactions. Therefore, robotic platforms that support human partners in daily activities should acquire similar…

Self/other distinction and self-recognition are important skills for interacting with the world, as it allows humans to differentiate own actions from others and be self-aware. However, only a selected group of animals, mainly high order…

When robots enter everyday human environments, they need to understand their tasks and how they should perform those tasks. To encode these, reward functions, which specify the objective of a robot, are employed. However, designing reward…

Humans are able to seamlessly visually imitate others, by inferring their intentions and using past experience to achieve the same end goal. In other words, we can parse complex semantic knowledge from raw video and efficiently translate…

Learning from demonstration (LfD) is commonly considered to be a natural and intuitive way to allow novice users to teach motor skills to robots. However, it is important to acknowledge that the effectiveness of LfD is heavily dependent on…

When encountering novel objects, humans are able to infer a wide range of physical properties such as mass, friction and deformability by interacting with them in a goal driven way. This process of active interaction is in the same spirit…

A robot cannot lift up an object if it is not feasible to do so. However, in most research on robot lifting, "feasibility" is usually presumed to exist a priori. This paper proposes a three-step method for a humanoid robot to reason about…

This work aims to learn how to perform complex robot manipulation tasks that are composed of several, consecutively executed low-level sub-tasks, given as input a few visual demonstrations of the tasks performed by a person. The sub-tasks…

Aesthetics - often treated as secondary to function-guides how people interpret robots' roles. A great deal of robot designs - both real and fictitious - use sleek industrial aesthetics. These feature hard glossy plastics, hiding as much of…

In this paper, we present a tool to assess users ability to change tasks. To do this, we use a variation of the Box and Blocks Test. In this version, a humanoid robot instructs a user to perform a task involving the movement of certain…

Application of humanoid robots has been common in the field of healthcare and education. It has been recurrently used to improve social behavior and mollify distress level among children with autism, cancer and cerebral palsy. This article…

Prediction is an appealing objective for self-supervised learning of behavioral skills, particularly for autonomous robots. However, effectively utilizing predictive models for control, especially with raw image inputs, poses a number of…