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Enabling humans and robots to collaborate effectively requires purposeful communication and an understanding of each other's affordances. Prior work in human-robot collaboration has incorporated knowledge of human affordances, i.e., their…
Reinforcement learning algorithms struggle on tasks with complex hierarchical dependency structures. Humans and other intelligent agents do not waste time assessing the utility of every high-level action in existence, but instead only…
Humans excel at acquiring knowledge through observation. For example, we can learn to use new tools by watching demonstrations. This skill is fundamental for intelligent systems to interact with the world. A key step to acquire this skill…
Affordance detection refers to identifying the potential action possibilities of objects in an image, which is a crucial ability for robot perception and manipulation. To empower robots with this ability in unseen scenarios, we first study…
Classically, affordance research investigates how the shape of objects communicates actions to potential users. Cognitive affordances, a subset of this research, characterize how the design of objects influences cognitive actions, such as…
Many robotic tasks in real-world environments require physical interactions with an object such as pick up or push. For successful interactions, the robot needs to know the object's affordances, which are defined as the potential actions…
A core problem of Embodied AI is to learn object manipulation from observation, as humans do. To achieve this, it is important to localize 3D object affordance areas through observation such as images (3D affordance grounding) and…
For effective interactions with the open world, robots should understand how interactions with known and novel objects help them towards their goal. A key aspect of this understanding lies in detecting an object's affordances, which…
Robots are often required to operate in environments where humans are not present, but yet require the human context information for better human-robot interaction. Even when humans are present in the environment, detecting their presence…
Infants learn actively in their environments, shaping their own learning curricula. They learn about their environments' affordances, that is, how local circumstances determine how their behavior can affect the environment. Here we model…
Contrary to the vast literature in modeling, perceiving, and understanding agent-object (e.g., human-object, hand-object, robot-object) interaction in computer vision and robotics, very few past works have studied the task of object-object…
Robots are increasingly expected to manipulate objects in ever more unstructured environments where the object properties have high perceptual uncertainty from any single sensory modality. This directly impacts successful object…
In model-based learning, the agent learns behaviors by simulating trajectories based on world model predictions. Standard world models typically learn a stationary transition function that maps states and actions to next states, when an…
Affordances enable robots to have a semantic understanding of their surroundings. This allows them to have more acting flexibility when completing a given task. Capturing object affordances in a machine learning model is a difficult task,…
Building a robot that can understand and learn to interact by watching humans has inspired several vision problems. However, despite some successful results on static datasets, it remains unclear how current models can be used on a robot…
Learning to manipulate 3D objects in an interactive environment has been a challenging problem in Reinforcement Learning (RL). In particular, it is hard to train a policy that can generalize over objects with different semantic categories,…
For robots to exhibit a high level of intelligence in the real world, they must be able to assess objects for which they have no prior knowledge. Therefore, it is crucial for robots to perceive object affordances by reasoning about physical…
Interactions with articulated objects are a challenging but important task for mobile robots. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel closed-loop control pipeline, which integrates manipulation priors from affordance estimation with…
In the ecological approach to perception and action, information that specifies affordances is available in the energy arrays surrounding organisms, and this information is detected by organisms in order to perceptually guide their actions.…
The ability to autonomously explore and navigate a physical space is a fundamental requirement for virtually any mobile autonomous agent, from household robotic vacuums to autonomous vehicles. Traditional SLAM-based approaches for…