Related papers: Robot Behavior Personalization from Sparse User Fe…
Recent work in sim2real has successfully enabled robots to act in physical environments by training in simulation with a diverse ''population'' of environments (i.e. domain randomization). In this work, we focus on enabling generalization…
Large-scale data is an essential component of machine learning as demonstrated in recent advances in natural language processing and computer vision research. However, collecting large-scale robotic data is much more expensive and slower as…
For robots to be effectively deployed in novel environments and tasks, they must be able to understand the feedback expressed by humans during intervention. This can either correct undesirable behavior or indicate additional preferences.…
We propose a planning and control approach to physics-based manipulation. The key feature of the algorithm is that it can adapt to the accuracy requirements of a task, by slowing down and generating `careful' motion when the task requires…
In open-ended continuous environments, robots need to learn multiple parameterised control tasks in hierarchical reinforcement learning. We hypothesise that the most complex tasks can be learned more easily by transferring knowledge from…
Specifying complex task behaviours while ensuring good robot performance may be difficult for untrained users. We study a framework for users to specify rules for acceptable behaviour in a shared environment such as industrial facilities.…
When interacting with each other, humans adjust their behavior based on perceived trust. To achieve similar adaptability, robots must accurately estimate human trust at sufficiently granular timescales while collaborating with humans. Beta…
Assistive agents should be able to perform under-specified long-horizon tasks while respecting user preferences. We introduce Actively Discovering and Adapting to Preferences for any Task (ADAPT) -- a benchmark designed to evaluate agents'…
The study of human-robot interaction is fundamental to the design and use of robotics in real-world applications. Robots will need to predict and adapt to the actions of human collaborators in order to achieve good performance and improve…
Effective human-robot collaboration requires informed anticipation. The robot must anticipate the human's actions, but also react quickly and intuitively when its predictions are wrong. The robot must plan its actions to account for the…
There is a growing interest in developing automated agents that can work alongside humans. In addition to completing the assigned task, such an agent will undoubtedly be expected to behave in a manner that is preferred by the human. This…
To engender safe and efficient human-robot collaboration, it is critical to generate high-fidelity predictions of human behavior. The challenges in making accurate predictions lie in the stochasticity and heterogeneity in human behaviors.…
As assistive and collaborative robots become more ubiquitous in the real-world, we need to develop interfaces and controllers that are safe for users to build trust and encourage adoption. In this Blue Sky paper, we discuss the need for…
With an increasing interest in human-robot collaboration, there is a need to develop robot behavior while keeping the human user's preferences in mind. Highly skilled human users doing delicate tasks require their robot partners to behave…
A service robot can provide a smoother interaction experience if it has the ability to proactively detect whether a nearby user intends to interact, in order to adapt its behavior e.g. by explicitly showing that it is available to provide a…
Robot-to-human handovers often rely on static, open-loop strategies (or, at best, approaches that adapt only the position), which generally do not consider how the object will be grasped by the human, thus requiring the user to adapt. This…
Imitation learning frameworks that learn robot control policies from demonstrators' motions via hand-mounted demonstration interfaces have attracted increasing attention. However, due to differences in physical characteristics between…
Reinforcement learning (RL) excels in optimizing policies for discrete-time Markov decision processes (MDP). However, various systems are inherently continuous in time, making discrete-time MDPs an inexact modeling choice. In many…
The requirement for autonomous robots to exhibit higher-level cognitive skills by planning and adapting in an ever-changing environment is indeed a great challenge for the AI community. Progress has been made in the automated planning…
Tactile sensing is essential for robots to achieve human-like gentle manipulation. However, existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models struggle to exploit tactile feedback for gentle manipulation due to scarce aligned…