Related papers: Learning Latent Actions to Control Assistive Robot…
We demonstrate a robot-assisted feeding system that enables people with mobility impairments to feed themselves. Our system design embodies Safety, Portability, and User Control, with comprehensive full-stack safety checks, the ability to…
Many people suffer from the loss of a limb. Learning to get by without an arm or hand can be very challenging, and existing prostheses do not yet fulfil the needs of individuals with amputations. One promising solution is to provide greater…
This work adds on to the on-going efforts to provide more autonomy to space robots. Here the concept of programming by demonstration or imitation learning is used for trajectory planning of manipulators mounted on small spacecraft. For…
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…
To learn manipulation skills, robots need to understand the features of those skills. An easy way for robots to learn is through Learning from Demonstration (LfD), where the robot learns a skill from an expert demonstrator. While the main…
Robots will become ubiquitously useful only when they can use few attempts to teach themselves to perform different tasks, even with complex bodies and in dynamical environments. Vertebrates, in fact, successfully use trial-and-error to…
Human-robot object handover is a crucial element for assistive robots that aim to help people in their daily lives, including elderly care, hospitals, and factory floors. The existing approaches to solving these tasks rely on pre-selected…
Robots are becoming a vital ingredient in society. Some of their daily tasks require dual-arm manipulation skills in the rapidly changing, dynamic and unpredictable real-world environments where they have to operate. Given the expertise of…
Robots that can operate autonomously in a human living environment are necessary to have the ability to handle various tasks flexibly. One crucial element is coordinated bimanual movements that enable functions that are difficult to perform…
Human assistive robotics have the potential to help the elderly and individuals living with disabilities with their Activities of Daily Living (ADL). Robotics researchers focus on assistive tasks from the perspective of various control…
The progressive prevalence of robots in human-suited environments has given rise to a myriad of object manipulation techniques, in which dexterity plays a paramount role. It is well-established that humans exhibit extraordinary dexterity…
Despite the growth of physically assistive robotics (PAR) research over the last decade, nearly half of PAR user studies do not involve participants with the target disabilities. There are several reasons for this -- recruitment challenges,…
Employing a teleoperation system for gathering demonstrations offers the potential for more efficient learning of robot manipulation. However, teleoperating a robot arm equipped with a dexterous hand or gripper, via a teleoperation system…
Humans coordinate the abundant degrees of freedom (DoFs) of hands to dexterously perform tasks in everyday life. We imitate human strategies to advance the dexterity of multi-DoF robotic hands. Specifically, we enable a robot hand to grasp…
The impressive capabilities of humans to robustly perform manipulation relies on compliant interactions, enabled through the structure and materials spatially distributed in our hands. We propose by mimicking this distributed compliance in…
Autonomous feeding is challenging because it requires manipulation of food items with various compliance, sizes, and shapes. To understand how humans manipulate food items during feeding and to explore ways to adapt their strategies to…
Shared control in teleoperation for providing robot assistance to accomplish object manipulation, called telemanipulation, is a new promising yet challenging problem. This has unique challenges--on top of teleoperation challenges in…
Assistive robotics is an important subarea of robotics that focuses on the well-being of people with disabilities. A robotic guide dog is an assistive quadruped robot that helps visually impaired people in obstacle avoidance and navigation.…
Robot-to-human handovers often rely on static, open-loop strategies (or, at best, approaches that adapt only the position), which generally do not consider how the object will be grasped by the human, thus requiring the user to adapt. This…
Recent works on shared autonomy and assistive-AI technologies, such as assistive robot teleoperation, seek to model and help human users with limited ability in a fixed task. However, these approaches often fail to account for humans'…