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Due to burdensome data requirements, learning from demonstration often falls short of its promise to allow users to quickly and naturally program robots. Demonstrations are inherently ambiguous and incomplete, making correct generalization…
Assistive robots enable people with disabilities to conduct everyday tasks on their own. However, these tasks can be complex, containing both coarse reaching motions and fine-grained manipulation. For example, when eating, not only does one…
Humans can leverage physical interaction to teach robot arms. This physical interaction takes multiple forms depending on the task, the user, and what the robot has learned so far. State-of-the-art approaches focus on learning from a single…
Robotic systems are more present in our society everyday. In human-robot environments, it is crucial that end-users may correctly understand their robotic team-partners, in order to collaboratively complete a task. To increase action…
In the domain of autonomous household robots, it is of utmost importance for robots to understand human behaviors and provide appropriate services. This requires the robots to possess the capability to analyze complex human behaviors and…
We address goal-based imitation learning, where the aim is to output the symbolic goal from a third-person video demonstration. This enables the robot to plan for execution and reproduce the same goal in a completely different environment.…
When personal, assistive, and interactive robots make mistakes, humans naturally and intuitively correct those mistakes through physical interaction. In simple situations, one correction is sufficient to convey what the human wants. But…
Corrections offer a natural modality for people to provide feedback to a robot, by (i) intervening in the robot's behavior when they believe the robot is failing (or will fail) the task objectives and (ii) modifying the robot's behavior to…
This paper explores the challenges faced by assistive robots in effectively cooperating with humans, requiring them to anticipate human behavior, predict their actions' impact, and generate understandable robot actions. The study focuses on…
Assistive robotic arms enable users with physical disabilities to perform everyday tasks without relying on a caregiver. Unfortunately, the very dexterity that makes these arms useful also makes them challenging to teleoperate: the robot…
Programming robots to perform complex tasks is often difficult and time consuming, requiring expert knowledge and skills in robot software and sometimes hardware. Imitation learning is a method for training robots to perform tasks by…
Robots learn as they interact with humans. Consider a human teleoperating an assistive robot arm: as the human guides and corrects the arm's motion, the robot gathers information about the human's desired task. But how does the human know…
Human gaze is known to be a strong indicator of underlying human intentions and goals during manipulation tasks. This work studies gaze patterns of human teachers demonstrating tasks to robots and proposes ways in which such patterns can be…
Confusing or otherwise unhelpful learner feedback creates or perpetuates erroneous beliefs that the teacher and learner have of each other, thereby increasing the cognitive burden placed upon the human teacher. For example, the robot's…
The current spread of social and assistive robotics applications is increasingly highlighting the need for robots that can be easily taught and interacted with, even by users with no technical background. Still, it is often difficult to…
When deploying autonomous agents in the real world, we need effective ways of communicating objectives to them. Traditional skill learning has revolved around reinforcement and imitation learning, each with rigid constraints on the format…
A critical need in assistive robotics, such as assistive wheelchairs for navigation, is a need to learn task intent and safety guarantees through user interactions in order to ensure safe task performance. For tasks where the objectives…
This work aims to interpret human behavior to anticipate potential user confusion when a robot provides explanations for failure, allowing the robot to adapt its explanations for more natural and efficient collaboration. Using a dataset…
During human-robot interaction (HRI), we want the robot to understand us, and we want to intuitively understand the robot. In order to communicate with and understand the robot, we can leverage interactions, where the human and robot…
Intuitively, obedience -- following the order that a human gives -- seems like a good property for a robot to have. But, we humans are not perfect and we may give orders that are not best aligned to our preferences. We show that when a…