Related papers: Towards a Framework for Comparing the Complexity o…
Affordances are key attributes of what must be perceived by an autonomous robotic agent in order to effectively interact with novel objects. Historically, the concept derives from the literature in psychology and cognitive science, where…
There is currently a rapid increase in the number of challenge problem, benchmarking datasets and algorithmic optimization tests for evaluating AI systems. However, there does not currently exist an objective measure to determine the…
We introduce several notions of reduction in distributed computing, and investigate reduction properties of two fundamental agreement tasks, namely Consensus and Atomic Commitment. We first propose the notion of reduction "a la Karp'', an…
As robotic teammates become more common in society, people will assess the robots' roles in their interactions along many dimensions. One such dimension is effectiveness: people will ask whether their robotic partners are trustworthy and…
The main objective of this paper is to introduce a new method for qualitative analysis of various designs of robot arms. To this end we define the complexity of a map, examine its main properties and develop some methods of computation. In…
We consider a reinforcement learning framework where agents have to navigate from start states to goal states. We prove convergence of a cycle-detection learning algorithm on a class of tasks that we call reducible. Reducible tasks have an…
In lifelong learning, a learner faces a sequence of tasks with shared structure and aims to identify and leverage it to accelerate learning. We study the setting where such structure is captured by a common representation of data. Unlike…
A robot can invoke heterogeneous computation resources such as CPUs, cloud GPU servers, or even human computation for achieving a high-level goal. The problem of invoking an appropriate computation model so that it will successfully…
Multi-robot task allocation is one of the most fundamental classes of problems in robotics and is crucial for various real-world robotic applications such as search, rescue and area exploration. We consider the Single-Task robots and…
Complexity remains one of the central challenges in science and technology. Although several approaches at defining and/or quantifying complexity have been proposed, at some point each of them seems to run into intrinsic limitations or…
Executing multiple tasks concurrently is important in many robotic applications. Moreover, the prioritization of tasks is essential in applications where safety-critical tasks need to precede application-related objectives, in order to…
This paper addresses the task allocation problem for multi-robot systems. The main issue with the task allocation problem is inherent complexity that makes finding an optimal solution within a reasonable time almost impossible. To hand the…
We propose a new formulation for the multi-robot task allocation problem that incorporates (a) complex precedence relationships between tasks, (b) efficient intra-task coordination, and (c) cooperation through the formation of robot…
When robots enter everyday human environments, they need to understand their tasks and how they should perform those tasks. To encode these, reward functions, which specify the objective of a robot, are employed. However, designing reward…
We consider problems in which robots conspire to present a view of the world that differs from reality. The inquiry is motivated by the problem of validating robot behavior physically despite there being a discrepancy between the robots we…
One of the biggest hurdles robotics faces is the facet of sophisticated and hard-to-engineer behaviors. Reinforcement learning offers a set of tools, and a framework to address this problem. In parallel, the misgivings of robotics offer a…
As robots and other intelligent agents move from simple environments and problems to more complex, unstructured settings, manually programming their behavior has become increasingly challenging and expensive. Often, it is easier for a…
Task allocation has been a well studied problem. In most prior problem formulations, it is assumed that each task is associated with a unique set of resource requirements. In the scope of multi-robot task allocation problem, these…
The measure of a machine learning algorithm is the difficulty of the tasks it can perform, and sufficiently difficult tasks are critical drivers of strong machine learning models. However, quantifying the generalization difficulty of…
One of the challenges of full autonomy is to have a robot capable of manipulating its current environment to achieve another environment configuration. This paper is a step towards this challenge, focusing on the visual understanding of the…