Related papers: Limits of specifiability for sensor-based robotic …
When performing manipulation-based activities such as picking objects, a mobile robot needs to position its base at a location that supports successful execution. To address this problem, prominent approaches typically rely on costly grasp…
Collaborative robotics requires effective communication between a robot and a human partner. This work proposes a set of interpretive principles for how a robotic arm can use pointing actions to communicate task information to people by…
People rely heavily on context to enrich meaning beyond what is literally said, enabling concise but effective communication. To interact successfully and naturally with people, user-facing artificial intelligence systems will require…
Spoken language is a convenient interface for commanding a mobile robot. Yet for this to work a number of base terms must be grounded in perceptual and motor skills. We detail the language processing used on our robot ELI and explain how…
Language models (LMs) have demonstrated their capability in possessing commonsense knowledge of the physical world, a crucial aspect of performing tasks in everyday life. However, it remains unclear **whether LMs have the capacity to…
This technical report presents an introduction to different aspects of multi-fingered robot grasping. After having introduced relevant mathematical background for modeling, form and force closure are discussed. Next, we present an overview…
This paper addresses the problem of task planning for robots that must comply with operational manuals in real-world settings. Task planning under these constraints is essential for enabling autonomous robot operation in domains that…
One promising approach towards effective robot decision making in complex, long-horizon tasks is to sequence together parameterized skills. We consider a setting where a robot is initially equipped with (1) a library of parameterized…
A wide range of human-robot collaborative applications in diverse domains such as manufacturing, health care, the entertainment industry, and social interactions, require an autonomous robot to follow its human companion. Different working…
Advanced communication protocols are critical to enable the coexistence of autonomous robots with humans. Thus, the development of explanatory capabilities is an urgent first step toward autonomous robots. This survey provides an overview…
This paper explores general multi-robot task and motion planning, where multiple robots in close proximity manipulate objects while satisfying constraints and a given goal. In particular, we formulate the plan refinement problem--which,…
Specifying the intended behaviour of autonomous systems is becoming increasingly important but is fraught with many challenges. This technical report provides an overview of existing work on specifications of autonomous systems and places a…
We study the problem of learning a range of vision-based manipulation tasks from a large offline dataset of robot interaction. In order to accomplish this, humans need easy and effective ways of specifying tasks to the robot. Goal images…
A workflow specification defines a set of steps and the order in which those steps must be executed. Security requirements may impose constraints on which groups of users are permitted to perform subsets of those steps. A workflow…
Consider the problem of planning collision-free motion of $n$ objects in the plane movable through contact with a robot that can autonomously translate in the plane and that can move a maximum of $m \leq n$ objects simultaneously. This…
While real world challenges typically define visual categories with language words or phrases, most visual classification methods define categories with numerical indices. However, the language specification of the classes provides an…
Recent advances in learning-based robot manipulation have produced policies with remarkable capabilities. Yet, reliability at deployment remains a fundamental barrier to real-world use, where distribution shift, compounding errors, and…
Mobile ground robots operating on unstructured terrain must predict which areas of the environment they are able to pass in order to plan feasible paths. We address traversability estimation as a heightmap classification problem: we build a…
We study planning problems faced by robots operating in uncertain environments with incomplete knowledge of state, and actions that are noisy and/or imprecise. This paper identifies a new problem sub-class that models settings in which…
Evaluating the generalisation capabilities of multimodal models based solely on their performance on out-of-distribution data fails to capture their true robustness. This work introduces a comprehensive evaluation framework that…