Related papers: Teaching Robots to Span the Space of Functional Ex…
We observe a large variety of robots in terms of their bodies, sensors, and actuators. Given the commonalities in the skill sets, teaching each skill to each different robot independently is inefficient and not scalable when the large…
In recent years, researchers and manufacturers have started to investigate ways to enable autonomous vehicles (AVs) to interact with nearby pedestrians in compensation for the absence of human drivers. The majority of these efforts focuses…
Emotion expressions serve as important communicative signals and are crucial cues in intuitive interactions between humans. Hence, it is essential to include these fundamentals in robotic behavior strategies when interacting with humans to…
Humans effortlessly "program" one another by communicating goals and desires in natural language. In contrast, humans program robotic behaviours by indicating desired object locations and poses to be achieved, by providing RGB images of…
The ability of robots to model their own dynamics is key to autonomous planning and learning, as well as for autonomous damage detection and recovery. Traditionally, dynamic models are pre-programmed or learned from external observations.…
We address the problem of autonomous exploration and mapping for a mobile robot using visual inputs. Exploration and mapping is a well-known and key problem in robotics, the goal of which is to enable a robot to explore a new environment…
This paper describes a between-subjects Amazon Mechanical Turk study (n = 220) that investigated how a robot's affective narrative influences its ability to elicit empathy in human observers. We first conducted a pilot study to develop and…
Expressive behaviors in robots are critical for effectively conveying their emotional states during interactions with humans. In this work, we present a framework that autonomously generates realistic and diverse robotic emotional…
Flexible manufacturing processes demand robots to easily adapt to changes in the environment and interact with humans. In such dynamic scenarios, robotic tasks may be programmed through learning-from-demonstration approaches, where a…
Endowed with higher levels of autonomy, robots are required to perform increasingly complex manipulation tasks. Learning from demonstration is arising as a promising paradigm for transferring skills to robots. It allows to implicitly learn…
End-to-end autonomous driving (AD) systems increasingly adopt vision-language-action (VLA) models, yet they typically ignore the passenger's emotional state, which is central to comfort and AD acceptance. We introduce Open-Domain End-to-End…
Learning from demonstration is an effective method for human users to instruct desired robot behaviour. However, for most non-trivial tasks of practical interest, efficient learning from demonstration depends crucially on inductive bias in…
This paper presents a novel human-robot interaction setup for robot and human learning of symbolic language for identifying robot homeostatic needs. The robot and human learn to use and respond to the same language symbols that convey…
Robots need models of human behavior for both inferring human goals and preferences, and predicting what people will do. A common model is the Boltzmann noisily-rational decision model, which assumes people approximately optimize a reward…
We can make it easier for disabled users to control assistive robots by mapping the user's low-dimensional joystick inputs to high-dimensional, complex actions. Prior works learn these mappings from human demonstrations: a non-disabled…
Nonverbal visual symbols and displays play an important role in communication when humans and robots work collaboratively. However, few studies have investigated how different types of non-verbal cues affect objective task performance,…
In this paper we present an approach for learning to imitate human behavior on a semantic level by markerless visual observation. We analyze a set of spatial constraints on human pose data extracted using convolutional pose machines and…
We present a scalable framework for cross-embodiment humanoid robot control by learning a shared latent representation that unifies motion across humans and diverse humanoid platforms, including single-arm, dual-arm, and legged humanoid…
For a robot to be called socially intelligent, it must be able to infer users internal states from their current behaviour, predict the users future behaviour, and if required, respond appropriately. In this work, we investigate how robots…
Programming a robot to deal with open-ended tasks remains a challenge, in particular if the robot has to manipulate objects. Launching, grasping, pushing or any other object interaction can be simulated but the corresponding models are not…