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Robot planning in partially observable domains is difficult, because a robot needs to estimate the current state and plan actions at the same time. When the domain includes many objects, reasoning about the objects and their relationships…
Autonomous robots operating in complex, unstructured environments face significant challenges due to latent, unobserved factors that obscure their understanding of both their internal state and the external world. Addressing this challenge…
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…
Teaching autonomous mobile robots to successfully navigate human crowds is a challenging task. Not only does it require planning, but it requires maintaining social norms which may differ from one context to another. Here we focus on crowd…
Human collaborators coordinate effectively their actions through both verbal and non-verbal communication. We believe that the the same should hold for human-robot teams. We propose a formalism that enables a robot to decide optimally…
Robots often need to convey information to human users. For example, robots can leverage visual, auditory, and haptic interfaces to display their intent or express their internal state. In some scenarios there are socially agreed upon…
Autonomous robots have real-world applications in diverse fields, such as mobile manipulation and environmental exploration, and many such tasks benefit from a hands-off approach in terms of human user involvement over a long task horizon.…
We propose a decision-theoretic framework in which a robot strategically can shape inferred human's prosocial state during repeated interactions. Modeling the human's prosociality as a latent state that evolves over time, the robot learns…
Cultural competence is a well known requirement for an effective healthcare, widely investigated in the nursing literature. We claim that personal assistive robots should likewise be culturally competent, aware of general cultural…
Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) have shown promising potential in therapeutic scenarios as decision-making instructors or motivational companions. In human-human therapy, experts often communicate the thought process behind the decisions…
We envision robots that can collaborate and communicate seamlessly with humans. It is necessary for such robots to decide both what to say and how to act, while interacting with humans. To this end, we introduce a new task, dialogue object…
Robotics has been a popular field of research in the past few decades, with much success in industrial applications such as manufacturing and logistics. This success is led by clearly defined use cases and controlled operating environments.…
Humans engaged in collaborative activities are naturally able to convey their intentions to teammates through multi-modal communication, which is made up of explicit and implicit cues. Similarly, a more natural form of human-robot…
We propose and demonstrate the task of giving natural language summaries of the actions of a robotic agent in a virtual environment. We explain why such a task is important, what makes it difficult, and discuss how it might be addressed. To…
Deployed, autonomous AI systems must often evaluate multiple plausible courses of action (extended sequences of behavior) in novel or under-specified contexts. Despite extensive training, these systems will inevitably encounter scenarios…
Social robots are increasingly being explored as tools to support emotional wellbeing, particularly in non-clinical settings. Drawing on a range of empirical studies and practical deployments, this paper outlines six key insights that…
Relational networks within a team play a critical role in the performance of many real-world multi-robot systems. To successfully accomplish tasks that require cooperation and coordination, different agents (e.g., robots) necessitate…
Object rearrangement is the problem of enabling a robot to identify the correct object placement in a complex environment. Prior work on object rearrangement has explored a diverse set of techniques for following user instructions to…
It is intractable for assistive robots to have all functionalities pre-programmed prior to deployment. Rather, it is more realistic for robots to perform supplemental, on-site learning about user's needs and preferences, and particularities…
What is the right way to reason about human activities? What directions forward are most promising? In this work, we analyze the current state of human activity understanding in videos. The goal of this paper is to examine datasets,…