Related papers: Communicating Robot Conventions through Shared Aut…

Enabling robots to provide effective assistance yet still accommodating the operator's commands for telemanipulation of an object is very challenging because robot's assistive action is not always intuitive for human operators and human…

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…

Understanding the intentions of robots is essential for natural and seamless human-robot collaboration. Ensuring that robots have means for non-verbal communication is a basis for intuitive and implicit interaction. For this, we contribute…

Bidirectional object handover between a human and a robot enables an important functionality skill in robotic human-centered manufacturing or services. The problem in achieving this skill lies in the capacity of any solution to deal with…

Recent works introduce general-purpose robot policies. These policies provide a strong prior over how robots should behave -- e.g., how a robot arm should manipulate food items. But in order for robots to match an individual person's needs,…

We are developing a system for human-robot communication that enables people to communicate with robots in a natural way and is focused on solving problems in a shared space. Our strategy for developing this system is fundamentally…

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…

Shared-autonomy imitation learning lets a human correct a robot in real time, mitigating covariate-shift errors. Yet existing approaches ignore two critical factors: (i) the operator's cognitive load and (ii) the risk created by delayed or…

A robot operating in isolation needs to reason over the uncertainty in its model of the world and adapt its own actions to account for this uncertainty. Similarly, a robot interacting with people needs to reason over its uncertainty over…

Recent development in developing humanoid robot poses new challenges to human-machine interaction communication. A major challenge is to develop robots that can behave like and interact with human in the most natural way possible. This…

Humans are highly skilled in communicating their intent for when and where a handover would occur. However, even the state-of-the-art robotic implementations for handovers typically lack of such communication skills. This study investigates…

Robots operating alongside humans often encounter unfamiliar environments that make autonomous task completion challenging. Though improving models and increasing dataset size can enhance a robot's performance in unseen environments, data…

Robotic assistants reduce the manual efforts being put in by humans in their day-to-day tasks. In this paper, we develop a voice-controlled personal assistant robot. The robot takes the human voice commands by its own built-in microphone.…

Assistive teleoperation, where control is shared between a human and a robot, enables efficient and intuitive human-robot collaboration in diverse and unstructured environments. A central challenge in real-world assistive teleoperation is…

In this survey, we present the current status on robots performing manipulation tasks that require varying contact with the environment, such that the robot must either implicitly or explicitly control the contact force with the environment…

We consider a service robot that offers chocolate treats to people passing in its proximity: it has the capability of predicting in advance a person's intention to interact, and to actuate an "offering" gesture, subtly extending the tray of…

In open-ended continuous environments, robots need to learn multiple parameterised control tasks in hierarchical reinforcement learning. We hypothesise that the most complex tasks can be learned more easily by transferring knowledge from…

Human-robot interaction often occurs in the form of instructions given from a human to a robot. For a robot to successfully follow instructions, a common representation of the world and objects in it should be shared between humans and the…

Humans have an extraordinary ability to communicate and read the properties of objects by simply watching them being carried by someone else. This level of communicative skills and interpretation, available to humans, is essential for…

Robotic minimally invasive interventions typically require using more than two instruments. We thus developed a foot pedal interface which allows the user to control a robotic arm (simultaneously to working with the hands) with four degrees…