Related papers: Hiding task-oriented programming complexity: an in…
Manufacturing is facing ever changing market demands, with faster innovation cycles resulting to growing agility and flexibility requirements. Industry 4.0 has been transforming the manufacturing world towards digital automation and the…
In the field of autonomous robots, reinforcement learning (RL) is an increasingly used method to solve the task of dynamic obstacle avoidance for mobile robots, autonomous ships, and drones. A common practice to train those agents is to use…
Adversarial training (i.e., training on adversarially perturbed input data) is a well-studied method for making neural networks robust to potential adversarial attacks during inference. However, the improved robustness does not come for…
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,…
Three challenges limit the progress of robot learning research: robots are expensive (few labs can participate), everyone uses different robots (findings do not generalize across labs), and we lack internet-scale robotics data. We take on…
Known attempts to build autonomous robots rely on complex control architectures, often implemented with the Robot Operating System platform (ROS). Runtime adaptation is needed in these systems, to cope with component failures and with…
Machine learning has long since become a keystone technology, accelerating science and applications in a broad range of domains. Consequently, the notion of applying learning methods to a particular problem set has become an established and…
Learning companion robots for young children are increasingly adopted in informal learning environments. Although parents play a pivotal role in their children's learning, very little is known about how parents prefer to incorporate robots…
Novel end-user programming (EUP) tools enable on-the-fly (i.e., spontaneous, easy, and rapid) creation of interactions with robotic systems. These tools are expected to empower users in determining system behavior, although very little is…
Conveying human goals to autonomous systems (AS) occurs both when the system is being designed and when it is being operated. The design-step conveyance is typically mediated by robotics and AI engineers, who must appropriately capture…
Background. Within the software industry, it is commonly estimated that software professionals invest a substantial portion of their work hours in the process of understanding existing systems. In this context, an ineffective technical…
A major challenge for the realization of intelligent robots is to supply them with cognitive abilities in order to allow ordinary users to program them easily and intuitively. One way of such programming is teaching work tasks by…
The representation of the knowledge needed by a robot to perform complex tasks is restricted by the limitations of perception. One possible way of overcoming this situation and designing "knowledgeable" robots is to rely on the interaction…
We are motivated by the problem of comparing the complexity of one robotic task relative to another. To this end, we define a notion of reduction that formalizes the following intuition: Task 1 reduces to Task 2 if we can efficiently…
Systematic testing of object-oriented software turned out to be much more complex than testing conventional software. Especially the highly incremental and iterative development cycle demands both many more changes and partially implemented…
Human-Robot Teams offer the flexibility needed for partial automation in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). They will thus be an integral part of Factories of the Future. Our research targets a particularly flexible teaming mode,…
Onboarding newcomers is vital for the sustainability of open-source software (OSS) projects. To lower barriers and increase engagement, OSS projects have dedicated experts who provide guidance for newcomers. However, timely responses are…
The thesis contributes in several important ways to the research area of 3D object category learning and recognition. To cope with the mentioned limitations, we look at human cognition, in particular at the fact that human beings learn to…
Robots are increasingly being deployed in public spaces. However, the general population rarely has the opportunity to nominate what they would prefer or expect a robot to do in these contexts. Since most people have little or no experience…
We propose an instructions-based approach for robot programming where the programmer interacts with the robot by issuing simple commands in a scripting language, like python. Internally, these commands make use of pre-programmed motion and…