Related papers: Teaching Robots to Span the Space of Functional Ex…
People employ expressive behaviors to effectively communicate and coordinate their actions with others, such as nodding to acknowledge a person glancing at them or saying "excuse me" to pass people in a busy corridor. We would like robots…
Emotions are very important for human intelligence. For example, emotions are closely related to the appraisal of the internal bodily state and external stimuli. This helps us to respond quickly to the environment. Another important…
This paper presents the development of a novel ethical reasoning framework for robots. "Robots Can Feel" is the first system for robots that utilizes a combination of logic and human-like emotion simulation to make decisions in morally…
We present a framework for learning human user models from joint-action demonstrations that enables the robot to compute a robust policy for a collaborative task with a human. The learning takes place completely automatically, without any…
In the field of Geriatronics, enabling effective and transparent communication between humans and robots is crucial for enhancing the acceptance and performance of assistive robots. Our early-stage research project investigates the…
Humans use semantic concepts such as spatial relations between objects to describe scenes and communicate tasks such as "Put the tea to the right of the cup" or "Move the plate between the fork and the spoon." Just as children, assistive…
Dimensional representations of speech emotions such as the arousal-valence (AV) representation provide a continuous and fine-grained description and control than their categorical counterparts. They have wide applications in tasks such as…
Humans have needs motivating their behavior according to intensity and context. However, we also create preferences associated with each action's perceived pleasure, which is susceptible to changes over time. This makes decision-making more…
Understanding action correspondence between humans and robots is essential for evaluating alignment in decision-making, particularly in human-robot collaboration and imitation learning within unstructured environments. We propose a…
In this paper we address the challenge of exploration in deep reinforcement learning for robotic manipulation tasks. In sparse goal settings, an agent does not receive any positive feedback until randomly achieving the goal, which becomes…
Estimating terrain traversability in off-road environments requires reasoning about complex interaction dynamics between the robot and these terrains. However, it is challenging to create informative labels to learn a model in a supervised…
Robots operating in human-centered environments should have the ability to understand how objects function: what can be done with each object, where this interaction may occur, and how the object is used to achieve a goal. To this end, we…
Assistive robots have the potential to help people perform everyday tasks. However, these robots first need to learn what it is their user wants them to do. Teaching assistive robots is hard for inexperienced users, elderly users, and users…
Human-centered environments are rich with a wide variety of spatial relations between everyday objects. For autonomous robots to operate effectively in such environments, they should be able to reason about these relations and generalize…
We propose a method to tackle the problem of mapless collision-avoidance navigation where humans are present using 2D laser scans. Our proposed method uses ego-safety to measure collision from the robot's perspective while social-safety to…
In Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC), the emotions of target utterances are closely dependent on their context. Therefore, existing works train the model to generate the response of the target utterance, which aims to recognise…
In human-robot cooperation, the robot cooperates with humans to accomplish the task together. Existing approaches assume the human has a specific goal during the cooperation, and the robot infers and acts toward it. However, in real-world…
This paper tackles the challenging task of evaluating socially situated conversational robots and presents a novel objective evaluation approach that relies on multimodal user behaviors. In this study, our main focus is on assessing the…
The increasing affordability of robot hardware is accelerating the integration of robots into everyday activities. However, training a robot to automate a task requires expensive trajectory data where a trained human annotator moves a…
Humans are efficient, yet expressive in their motion. Human walking behaviors can be used to walk across a great variety of surfaces without falling and to communicate internal state to other humans through variable gait styles. This…