Related papers: Towards Robot-Centric Conceptual Knowledge Acquisi…
My overarching research goal is to provide robots with perceptional abilities that allow interactions with humans in a human-like manner. To develop these perceptional abilities, I believe that it is useful to study the principles of the…
The thesis contributes in several important ways to the research area of 3D object category learning and recognition. To cope with the mentioned limitations, we look at human cognition, in particular at the fact that human beings learn to…
We humans rely on a wide range of commonsense knowledge to interact with an extensive number and categories of objects in the physical world. Likewise, such commonsense knowledge is also crucial for robots to successfully develop…
In recent years, there has been a resurgence in methods that use distributed (neural) representations to represent and reason about semantic knowledge for robotics applications. However, while robots often observe previously unknown…
Mobile robots, performing long-term manipulation activities in human environments, have to perceive a wide variety of objects possessing very different visual characteristics and need to reliably keep track of these throughout the execution…
Imitation learning enables robots to learn new tasks from human examples. One fundamental limitation while learning from humans is causal confusion. Causal confusion occurs when the robot's observations include both task-relevant and…
Symbolic anchoring is a crucial problem in the field of robotics, as it enables robots to obtain symbolic knowledge from the perceptual information acquired through their sensors. In cognitive-based robots, this process of processing…
Understanding manipulation scenarios allows intelligent robots to plan for appropriate actions to complete a manipulation task successfully. It is essential for intelligent robots to semantically interpret manipulation knowledge by…
Semantic 3D scene understanding is a problem of critical importance in robotics. While significant advances have been made in simultaneous localization and mapping algorithms, robots are still far from having the common sense knowledge…
Service robots are appearing more and more in our daily life. The development of service robots combines multiple fields of research, from object perception to object manipulation. The state-of-the-art continues to improve to make a proper…
As knowledge graph has the potential to bridge the gap between commonsense knowledge and reasoning over actionable capabilities of mobile robotic platforms, incorporating knowledge graph into robotic system attracted increasing attention in…
In this paper, we identify challenges in children's current information retrieval process, and propose conversational robots as an opportunity to ease this process in a responsible way. Tools children currently use in this process, such as…
The ability for autonomous agents to learn and conform to human norms is crucial for their safety and effectiveness in social environments. While recent work has led to frameworks for the representation and inference of simple social rules,…
Robots are widely collaborating with human users in diferent tasks that require high-level cognitive functions to make them able to discover the surrounding environment. A difcult challenge that we briefy highlight in this short paper is…
Sensorimotor contingency theory offers a promising account of the nature of perception, a topic rarely addressed in the robotics community. We propose a developmental framework to address the problem of the autonomous acquisition of…
The sense of touch plays a key role in enabling humans to understand and interact with surrounding environments. For robots, tactile sensing is also irreplaceable. While interacting with objects, tactile sensing provides useful information…
In a developmental framework, autonomous robots need to explore the world and learn how to interact with it. Without an a priori model of the system, this opens the challenging problem of having robots master their interface with the world:…
Robots which interact with the physical world will benefit from a fine-grained tactile understanding of objects and surfaces. Additionally, for certain tasks, robots may need to know the haptic properties of an object before touching it. To…
While today's robots are able to perform sophisticated tasks, they can only act on objects they have been trained to recognize. This is a severe limitation: any robot will inevitably see new objects in unconstrained settings, and thus will…
Interactions are central to intelligent reasoning and learning abilities, with the interpretation of abstract knowledge guiding meaningful interaction with objects in the environment. While humans readily adapt to novel situations by…