Related papers: Enhancing Speech Instruction Understanding and Dis…
Comprehension of spoken natural language is an essential component for robots to communicate with human effectively. However, handling unconstrained spoken instructions is challenging due to (1) complex structures including a wide variety…
Assistive shared-control robots have the potential to transform the lives of millions of people afflicted with severe motor impairments. The usefulness of shared-control robots typically relies on the underlying autonomy's ability to infer…
High-level human instructions often correspond to behaviors with multiple implicit steps. In order for robots to be useful in the real world, they must be able to to reason over both motions and intermediate goals implied by human…
In this paper, we investigate the use of 'prosody' (the musical elements of speech) as a communicative signal for intuitive human-robot interaction interfaces. Our approach, rooted in Research through Design (RtD), examines the application…
Effective human-robot collaboration in surgery is affected by the inherent ambiguity of verbal communication. This paper presents a framework for a robotic surgical assistant that interprets and disambiguates verbal instructions from a…
Robot manipulation tasks by natural language instructions need common understanding of the target object between human and the robot. However, the instructions often have an interpretation ambiguity, because the instruction lacks important…
Interactive robotic grasping using natural language is one of the most fundamental tasks in human-robot interaction. However, language can be a source of ambiguity, particularly when there are ambiguous visual or linguistic contents. This…
In recent years, robots are used in an increasing variety of tasks, especially by small- and medium- sized enterprises. These tasks are usually fast-changing, they have a collaborative scenario and happen in unpredictable environments with…
Collaborative robots must quickly adapt to their partner's intent and preferences to proactively identify helpful actions. This is especially true in situated settings where human partners can continually teach robots new high-level…
Ambiguities are inevitable in human-robot interaction, especially when a robot follows user instructions in a large, shared space. For example, if a user asks the robot to find an object in a home environment with underspecified…
Voice Assistants aim to fulfill user requests by choosing the best intent from multiple options generated by its Automated Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding sub-systems. However, voice assistants do not always produce…
Shared autonomy enables robots to infer user intent and assist in accomplishing it. But when the user wants to do a new task that the robot does not know about, shared autonomy will hinder their performance by attempting to assist them with…
In conversational speech, the acoustic signal provides cues that help listeners disambiguate difficult parses. For automatically parsing spoken utterances, we introduce a model that integrates transcribed text and acoustic-prosodic features…
Our goal is to enable a robot to learn how to sequence its actions to perform tasks specified as natural language instructions, given successful demonstrations from a human partner. The ability to plan high-level tasks can be factored as…
Identifying mistakes (i.e., miscues) made while reading aloud is commonly approached post-hoc by comparing automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcriptions to the target reading text. However, post-hoc methods perform poorly when ASR…
Contemporary approaches to perception, planning, estimation, and control have allowed robots to operate robustly as our remote surrogates in uncertain, unstructured environments. This progress now creates an opportunity for robots to…
Language-conditioned policies have recently gained substantial adoption in robotics as they allow users to specify tasks using natural language, making them highly versatile. While much research has focused on improving the action…
Emotion and intent recognition from speech is essential and has been widely investigated in human-computer interaction. The rapid development of social media platforms, chatbots, and other technologies has led to a large volume of speech…
Robots are becoming increasingly omnipresent in our daily lives, supporting us and carrying out autonomous tasks. In Human-Robot Interaction, human actors benefit from understanding the robot's motion intent to avoid task failures and…
Spoken intent detection has become a popular approach to interface with various smart devices with ease. However, such systems are limited to the preset list of intents-terms or commands, which restricts the quick customization of personal…