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In an efficient and flexible human-robot collaborative work environment, a robot team member must be able to recognize both explicit requests and implied actions from human users. Identifying "what to do" in such cases requires an agent to…
For planning an assembly of a product from a given set of parts, robots necessitate certain cognitive skills: high-level planning is needed to decide the order of actuation actions, while geometric reasoning is needed to check the…
Understanding human intentions is critical for safe and effective human-robot collaboration. While state of the art methods for human goal prediction utilize learned models to account for the uncertainty of human motion data, that data is…
It is well-known that a deep understanding of co-workers' behavior and preference is important for collaboration effectiveness. In this work, we present a method to accomplish smooth human-robot collaboration in close proximity by taking…
Robots that navigate through human crowds need to be able to plan safe, efficient, and human predictable trajectories. This is a particularly challenging problem as it requires the robot to predict future human trajectories within a crowd…
We present the Human And Robot Multimodal Observations of Natural Interactive Collaboration (HARMONIC) data set. This is a large multimodal data set of human interactions with a robotic arm in a shared autonomy setting designed to imitate…
A successful robot-assisted feeding system requires bite acquisition of a wide variety of food items. It must adapt to changing user food preferences under uncertain visual and physical environments. Different food items in different…
It is important for socially assistive robots to be able to recognize when a user needs and wants help. Such robots need to be able to recognize human needs in a real-time manner so that they can provide timely assistance. We propose an…
Physical caregiving robots hold promise for improving the quality of life of millions worldwide who require assistance with feeding. However, in-home meal assistance remains challenging due to the diversity of activities (e.g., eating,…
Assistance during eating is essential for those with severe mobility issues or eating risks. However, dependence on traditional human caregivers is linked to malnutrition, weight loss, and low self-esteem. For those who require eating…
Autonomous mobile robots need to perceive the environments with their onboard sensors (e.g., LiDARs and RGB cameras) and then make appropriate navigation decisions. In order to navigate human-inhabited public spaces, such a navigation task…
We explore the use of inner speech as a mechanism to enhance transparency and trust in social robots for dietary advice. In humans, inner speech structures thought processes and decision-making; in robotics, it improves explainability by…
Successful entrainment during collaboration positively affects trust, willingness to collaborate, and likeability towards collaborators. In this paper, we present a mixed-method study to investigate characteristics of successful entrainment…
In order to be effective teammates, robots need to be able to understand high-level human behavior to recognize, anticipate, and adapt to human motion. We have designed a new approach to enable robots to perceive human group motion in…
As robots become ubiquitous in the workforce, it is essential that human-robot collaboration be both intuitive and adaptive. A robot's quality improves based on its ability to explicitly reason about the time-varying (i.e. learning curves)…
We focus on the problem of how we can enable a robot to collaborate seamlessly with a human partner, specifically in scenarios where preexisting data is sparse. Much prior work in human-robot collaboration uses observational models of…
With momentum increasing in the use of social robots as long-term assistive and collaborative partners, humans developing social bonds with these artificial agents appears to be inevitable. In human-human dyads, social bonding plays a…
Close human-robot cooperation is a key enabler for new developments in advanced manufacturing and assistive applications. Close cooperation require robots that can predict human actions and intent, and understand human non-verbal cues.…
For successful goal-directed human-robot interaction, the robot should adapt to the intentions and actions of the collaborating human. This can be supported by musculoskeletal or data-driven human models, where the former are limited to…
To date, endowing robots with an ability to assess social appropriateness of their actions has not been possible. This has been mainly due to (i) the lack of relevant and labelled data, and (ii) the lack of formulations of this as a…