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Imitation learning is a popular approach for teaching motor skills to robots. However, most approaches focus on extracting policy parameters from execution traces alone (i.e., motion trajectories and perceptual data). No adequate…
This paper presents some early work and future plans regarding how the autonomous motions of a telepresence robot affect a person embodied in the robot through a head-mounted display. We consider the preferences, comfort, and the perceived…
As robots become more prevalent, optimizing their design for better performance and efficiency is becoming increasingly important. However, current robot design practices overlook the impact of perception and design choices on a robot's…
Learning visual representations from observing actions to benefit robot visuo-motor policy generation is a promising direction that closely resembles human cognitive function and perception. Motivated by this, and further inspired by…
As social service robots become commonplace, it is essential for them to effectively interpret human signals, such as verbal, gesture, and eye gaze, when people need to focus on their primary tasks to minimize interruptions and…
Quadruped robots are showing impressive abilities to navigate the real world. If they are to become more integrated into society, social trust in interactions with humans will become increasingly important. Additionally, robots will need to…
Individualized manufacturing is becoming an important approach as a means to fulfill increasingly diverse and specific consumer requirements and expectations. While there are various solutions to the implementation of the manufacturing…
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 can influence people to accomplish their tasks more efficiently: autonomous cars can inch forward at an intersection to pass through, and tabletop manipulators can go for an object on the table first. However, a robot's ability to…
Assistive robot arms can help humans by partially automating their desired tasks. Consider an adult with motor impairments controlling an assistive robot arm to eat dinner. The robot can reduce the number of human inputs -- and how precise…
Many works in robot teaching either focus only on teaching task knowledge, such as geometric constraints, or motion knowledge, such as the motion for accomplishing a task. However, to effectively teach a complex task sequence to a robot, it…
The reasoning capabilities of embodied agents introduce a critical, under-explored inferential privacy challenge, where the risk of an agent generate sensitive conclusions from ambient data. This capability creates a fundamental tension…
Feedback design is an important aspect of person-following robots for older adults. This paper presents a user-centred design approach to ensure the design is focused on the needs and preferences of the users. A sequence of user studies…
Natural language understanding for robotics can require substantial domain- and platform-specific engineering. For example, for mobile robots to pick-and-place objects in an environment to satisfy human commands, we can specify the language…
Humanoid robots are expected to navigate in changing environments and perform a variety of tasks. Frequently, these tasks require the robot to make decisions online regarding the speed and precision of following a reference path. For…
As robots increasingly enter human-centered environments, they must not only be able to navigate safely around humans, but also adhere to complex social norms. Humans often rely on non-verbal communication through gestures and facial…
Reinforcement learning and probabilistic reasoning algorithms aim at learning from interaction experiences and reasoning with probabilistic contextual knowledge respectively. In this research, we develop algorithms for robot task…
Socially assistive robots could help to support people's well-being in contexts such as art therapy where human therapists are scarce, by making art such as paintings together with people in a way that is emotionally contingent and…
Robots navigating in human crowds need to optimize their paths not only for their task performance but also for their compliance to social norms. One of the key challenges in this context is the lack of standard metrics for evaluating and…
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) must interact with a diverse set of human drivers in heterogeneous geographic areas. Ideally, fleets of AVs should share trajectory data to continually re-train and improve trajectory forecasting models from…