Related papers: Controlling Assistive Robots with Learned Latent A…

Imitation learning is a powerful paradigm for robot skill acquisition, yet conventional demonstration methods--such as kinesthetic teaching and teleoperation--are cumbersome, hardware-heavy, and disruptive to workflows. Recently, passive…

Robot-assisted dressing offers an opportunity to benefit the lives of many people with disabilities, such as some older adults. However, robots currently lack common sense about the physical implications of their actions on people. The…

Learning preferences implicit in the choices humans make is a well studied problem in both economics and computer science. However, most work makes the assumption that humans are acting (noisily) optimally with respect to their preferences.…

This chapter is about the fundamentals of fabrication, control, and human-robot interaction of a new type of collaborative robotic manipulators, called malleable robots, which are based on adjustable architectures of varying stiffness for…

Constraint-based control approaches offer a flexible way to specify robotic manipulation tasks and execute them on robots with many degrees of freedom. However, the specification of task constraints and their associated priorities usually…

As robots increasingly become part of shared human spaces, their movements must transcend basic functionality by incorporating expressive qualities to enhance engagement and communication. This paper introduces a movement-centered design…

Legged robots can have a unique role in manipulating objects in dynamic, human-centric, or otherwise inaccessible environments. Although most legged robotics research to date typically focuses on traversing these challenging environments,…

This paper presents a teleoperation system for controlling a redundant degree of freedom robot manipulator using human arm gestures. We propose a GRU-based Variational Autoencoder to learn a latent representation of the manipulator's…

In the context of imitation learning applied to dexterous robotic hands, the high complexity of the systems makes learning complex manipulation tasks challenging. However, the numerous datasets depicting human hands in various different…

Teleoperation can transfer human perception and cognition to a slave robot to cope with some complex tasks, in which the agility and flexibility of the interface play an important role in mapping human intention to the robot. In this paper,…

Robot-assisted navigation is a perfect example of a class of applications requiring flexible control approaches. When the human is reliable, the robot should concede space to their initiative. When the human makes inappropriate choices the…

Human-robot object handovers have been an actively studied area of robotics over the past decade; however, very few techniques and systems have addressed the challenge of handing over diverse objects with arbitrary appearance, size, shape,…

Human manipulation skills represent a pinnacle of their voluntary motor functions, requiring the coordination of many degrees of freedom and processing of high-dimensional sensor input to achieve remarkable dexterity. Thus, we set out to…

Haptic feedback is essential for humans to successfully perform complex and delicate manipulation tasks. A recent rise in tactile sensors has enabled robots to leverage the sense of touch and expand their capability drastically. However,…

Assistive robotic devices can be used to help people with upper body disabilities gaining more autonomy in their daily life. Although basic motions such as positioning and orienting an assistive robot gripper in space allow performance of…

Teleoperation is a valuable tool for robotic manipulators in highly unstructured environments. However, finding an intuitive mapping between a human hand and a non-anthropomorphic robot hand can be difficult, due to the hands' dissimilar…

We investigate robotic assistants for dressing that can anticipate the motion of the person who is being helped. To this end, we use reinforcement learning to create models of human behavior during assistance with dressing. To explore this…

Object manipulation is a basic element in everyday human lives. Robotic manipulation has progressed from maneuvering single-rigid-body objects with firm grasping to maneuvering soft objects and handling contact-rich actions. Meanwhile,…

Passive elastic elements can contribute to stability, energetic efficiency, and impact absorption in both biological and robotic systems. They also add dynamical complexity which makes them more challenging to model and control. The impact…

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…