Related papers: Spatial Concept-Based Navigation with Human Speech…

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…

The acoustic cues used by humans and other animals to localise sounds are subtle, and change during and after development. This means that we need to constantly relearn or recalibrate the auditory spatial map throughout our lifetimes. This…

The objective of this work is to augment the basic abilities of a robot by learning to use sensorimotor primitives to solve complex long-horizon manipulation problems. This requires flexible generative planning that can combine primitive…

Traditional imitation learning provides a set of methods and algorithms to learn a reward function or policy from expert demonstrations. Learning from demonstration has been shown to be advantageous for navigation tasks as it allows for…

We aim to reduce the burden of programming and deploying autonomous systems to work in concert with people in time-critical domains, such as military field operations and disaster response. Deployment plans for these operations are…

In this paper we focus on the challenging problem of place categorization and semantic mapping on a robot without environment-specific training. Motivated by their ongoing success in various visual recognition tasks, we build our system…

Space exploration missions have seen use of increasingly sophisticated robotic systems with ever more autonomy. Deep learning promises to take this even a step further, and has applications for high-level tasks, like path planning, as well…

We present an integrated Task-Motion Planning (TMP) framework for navigation in large-scale environments. Of late, TMP for manipulation has attracted significant interest resulting in a proliferation of different approaches. In contrast,…

Safe path planning is a crucial component in autonomous robotics. The many approaches to find a collision free path can be categorically divided into trajectory optimisers and sampling-based methods. When planning using occupancy maps, the…

Combining model-based and model-free deep reinforcement learning has shown great promise for improving sample efficiency on complex control tasks while still retaining high performance. Incorporating imagination is a recent effort in this…

Autonomous mobile robots need to perceive the environments with their onboard sensors (e.g., LiDARs and RGB cameras) and then make appropriate navigation decisions. In order to navigate human-inhabited public spaces, such a navigation task…

In this paper, we propose a novel Deep Reinforcement Learning approach to address the mapless navigation problem, in which the locomotion actions of a humanoid robot are taken online based on the knowledge encoded in learned models.…

Referring to objects in a natural and unambiguous manner is crucial for effective human-robot interaction. Previous research on learning-based referring expressions has focused primarily on comprehension tasks, while generating referring…

This paper proposes a generative probabilistic model integrating emergent communication and multi-agent reinforcement learning. The agents plan their actions by probabilistic inference, called control as inference, and communicate using…

One effective approach for equipping artificial agents with sensorimotor skills is to use self-exploration. To do this efficiently is critical, as time and data collection are costly. In this study, we propose an exploration mechanism that…

Sampling based methods are widely used for robotic motion planning. Traditionally, these samples are drawn from probabilistic ( or deterministic ) distributions to cover the state space uniformly. Despite being probabilistically complete,…

This paper concerns realizing highly efficient information-theoretic robot exploration with desired performance in complex scenes. We build a continuous lightweight inference model to predict the mutual information (MI) and the associated…

In this work, we aim to enable legged robots to learn how to interpret human social cues and produce appropriate behaviors through physical human guidance. However, learning through physical engagement can place a heavy burden on users when…

Objects in the world usually appear in context, participating in spatial relationships and interactions that are predictable and expected. Knowledge of these contexts can be used in the task of using a mobile camera to search for a…

In building artificial intelligence (AI) agents, referring to how brains function in real environments can accelerate development by reducing the design space. In this study, we propose a probabilistic generative model (PGM) for navigation…