Related papers: What Can This Robot Do? Learning from Appearance a…
Robots operating alongside humans often encounter unfamiliar environments that make autonomous task completion challenging. Though improving models and increasing dataset size can enhance a robot's performance in unseen environments, data…
Teaching Robotics is about empowering students to create and configure robotics devices and program computers to nurture in students the skill sets necessary to play an active role in society. The robot in Figure 1 focuses on the design of…
Collaborative decision-making with artificial intelligence (AI) agents presents opportunities and challenges. While human-AI performance often surpasses that of individuals, the impact of such technology on human behavior remains…
Learning from visual data opens the potential to accrue a large range of manipulation behaviors by leveraging human demonstrations without specifying each of them mathematically, but rather through natural task specification. In this paper,…
Robots operating in complex and uncertain environments face considerable challenges. Advanced robotic systems often rely on extensive datasets to learn manipulation tasks. In contrast, when humans are faced with unfamiliar tasks, such as…
To act in the world, robots rely on a representation of salient task aspects: for example, to carry a coffee mug, a robot may consider movement efficiency or mug orientation in its behavior. However, if we want robots to act for and with…
To collaborate well with robots, we must be able to understand their decision making. Humans naturally infer other agents' beliefs and desires by reasoning about their observable behavior in a way that resembles inverse reinforcement…
Manipulating unseen objects is challenging without a 3D representation, as objects generally have occluded surfaces. This requires physical interaction with objects to build their internal representations. This paper presents an approach…
Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is a framework that allows lay users to easily program robots. However, the efficiency of robot learning and the robot's ability to generalize to task variations hinges upon the quality and quantity of the…
As humans, we have a remarkable capacity for reading the characteristics of objects only by observing how another person carries them. Indeed, how we perform our actions naturally embeds information on the item features. Collaborative…
The term robot generally refers to a machine that looks and works in a way similar to a human. The modern industry is rapidly shifting from manual control of systems to automation, in order to increase productivity and to deliver quality…
Learning has propelled the cutting edge of performance in robotic control to new heights, allowing robots to operate with high performance in conditions that were previously unimaginable. The majority of the work, however, assumes that the…
Humanoid robots are increasingly being integrated into learning contexts to assist teaching and learning. However, challenges remain how to design and incorporate such robots in an educational context. As an important part of teaching…
This paper proposes a robot action planning scheme that provides an efficient and probabilistically safe plan for a robot interacting with an unconcerned human -- someone who is either unaware of the robot's presence or unwilling to engage…
Common-sense physical reasoning is an essential ingredient for any intelligent agent operating in the real-world. For example, it can be used to simulate the environment, or to infer the state of parts of the world that are currently…
Robots operating in an open world will encounter novel objects with unknown physical properties, such as mass, friction, or size. These robots will need to sense these properties through interaction prior to performing downstream tasks with…
Robot-assisted dressing could profoundly enhance the quality of life of adults with physical disabilities. To achieve this, a robot can benefit from both visual and force sensing. The former enables the robot to ascertain human body pose…
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,…
A key aspect of a robot's knowledge base is self-awareness about what it is capable of doing. It allows to define which tasks it can be assigned to and which it cannot. We will refer to this knowledge as the Capability concept. As…
Planning for robotic manipulation requires reasoning about the changes a robot can affect on objects. When such interactions can be modelled analytically, as in domains with rigid objects, efficient planning algorithms exist. However, in…