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Amal Nanavati

5 accepted papers

2025

To Ask or not to Ask: Human-in-the-loop Contextual Bandits with Applications in Robot-Assisted Feeding

ICRA 2025

Robot-assisted bite acquisition involves picking up food items with varying shapes, compliance, sizes, and textures. Fully autonomous strategies may not generalize efficiently across this diversity. We propose leveraging feedback from the care recipient when encountering novel food items. However, f

Cited by 9SourceScholar
2023

Towards General Single-Utensil Food Acquisition with Human-Informed Actions

CoRL 2023poster

Food acquisition with common general-purpose utensils is a necessary component of robot applications like in-home assistive feeding. Learning acquisition policies in this space is difficult in part because any model will need to contend with extensive state and actions spaces. Food is extremely dive…

Cited by 11SourceScholar
2021

Learning Backchanneling Behaviors for a Social Robot via Data Augmentation from Human-Human Conversations

CoRL 2021poster

Backchanneling behaviors on a robot, such as nodding, can make talking to a robot feel more natural and engaging by giving a sense that the robot is actively listening. For backchanneling to be effective, it is important that the timing of such cues is appropriate given the humans' conversational be…

Cited by 30SourceScholar
2021

Modeling Human Helpfulness with Individual and Contextual Factors for Robot Planning

RSS 2021poster

Robots deployed in human-populated spaces often need human help to effectively complete their tasks. Yet; a robot that asks for help too frequently or at the wrong times may cause annoyance; and a robot that asks too infrequently may be unable to complete its tasks. In this paper; we present a model…

2019

Follow The Robot: Modeling Coupled Human-Robot Dyads During Navigation

IROS 2019poster

Many robot applications being explored involve robots leading humans during navigation. Developing effective robots for this task requires a way for robots to understand and model a human's following behavior. In this paper, we present results from a user study of how humans follow a guide robot in…

Cited by 24SourceScholar