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How should a robot speak in a formal, quiet and dark, or a bright, lively and noisy environment? By designing robots to speak in a more social and ambient-appropriate manner we can improve perceived awareness and intelligence for these…
Rather than programming, training allows robots to achieve behaviors that generalize better and are capable to respond to real-world needs. However, such training requires a big amount of experimentation which is not always feasible for a…
Robot assistants for older adults and people with disabilities need to interact with their users in collaborative tasks. The core component of these systems is an interaction manager whose job is to observe and assess the task, and infer…
For robots to perform assistive tasks in unstructured home environments, they must learn and reason on the semantic knowledge of the environments. Despite a resurgence in the development of semantic reasoning architectures, these methods…
This paper introduces our approach to building a robot with communication capability based on the two key features: stochastic neural dynamics and prediction error minimization (PEM). A preliminary experiment with humanoid robots showed…
When studying robots collaborating with humans, much of the focus has been on robot policies that coordinate fluently with human teammates in collaborative tasks. However, less emphasis has been placed on the effect of the environment on…
As human-robot interaction (HRI) systems advance, so does the difficulty of evaluating and understanding the strengths and limitations of these systems in different environments and with different users. To this end, previous methods have…
Simulation models often have parameters as input and return outputs to understand the behavior of complex systems. Calibration is the process of estimating the values of the parameters in a simulation model in light of observed data from…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has received a lot of attention from the research community in recent years. As the technology moves away from game playing to practical contexts, such as autonomous vehicles and robotics, it is crucial to…
Animal welfare education could greatly benefit from customized robots to help children learn about animals and their behavior, and thereby promote positive, safe child-animal interactions. To this end, we ran Participatory Design workshops…
Groundbreaking successes have been achieved by Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) in solving practical decision-making problems. Robotics, in particular, can involve high-cost hardware and human interactions. Hence, scrupulous evaluations of…
The challenge of robotic reproduction -- making of new robots by recombining two existing ones -- has been recently cracked and physically evolving robot systems have come within reach. Here we address the next big hurdle: producing an…
Randomized experiments ensure robust causal inference that are critical to effective learning analytics research and practice. However, traditional randomized experiments, like A/B tests, are limiting in large scale digital learning…
Learning object manipulation is a critical skill for robots to interact with their environment. Even though there has been significant progress in robotic manipulation of rigid objects, interacting with non-rigid objects remains challenging…
We propose a novel framework for Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) in modular robotics using traditional robotic tools that extend state-of-the-art DRL implementations and provide an end-to-end approach which trains a robot directly from…
Rapid robotic system development sets a demand for multi-disciplinary methods and tools to explore and compare design alternatives. In this paper, we present collaborative modeling that combines discrete-event models of controller software…
While the exploration for embodied AI has spanned multiple decades, it remains a persistent challenge to endow agents with human-level intelligence, including perception, learning, reasoning, decision-making, control, and generalization…
In order for robots and other artificial agents to efficiently learn to perform useful tasks defined by an end user, they must understand not only the goals of those tasks, but also the structure and dynamics of that user's environment.…
Estimating the internal state of a robotic system is complex: this is performed from multiple heterogeneous sensor inputs and knowledge sources. Discretization of such inputs is done to capture saliences, represented as symbolic…
Recent developments of advanced driver-assistance systems necessitate an increasing number of tests to validate new technologies. These tests cannot be carried out on track in a reasonable amount of time and automotive groups rely on…