7 accepted papers
When a robot adapts a learned task for a novel environment, any changes to objects in the novel environment have an unknown effect on its task execution. For example, replacing an object in a pick-and-place task affects where the robot should target its actions, but does not necessarily affect the u…
Humans use audio signals in the form of spoken language or verbal reactions effectively when teaching new skills or tasks to other humans. While demonstrations allow humans to teach robots in a natural way, learning from trajectories alone does not leverage other available modalities including audio…
Affordance models are widely used in robotics to represent a robot's possible interactions with its environment. However, robot affordance models are inherently quantitative, making them difficult for humans to understand and interact with. To address this problem, previous works have constructed af…
As researchers teach robots to perform more and more complex tasks, the need for realistic simulation environments is growing. Existing techniques for closing the reality gap by approximating real-world physics often require extensive real world data and/or thousands of simulation samples. This pape
Human gaze is known to be a strong indicator of underlying human intentions and goals during manipulation tasks. This work studies gaze patterns of human teachers demonstrating tasks to robots and proposes ways in which such patterns can be used to enhance robot learning. Using both kinesthetic teac
Gaze provides subtle informative cues to aid fluent interactions among people. Incorporating human gaze predictions can signify how engaged a person is while interacting with a robot and allow the robot to predict a human's intentions or goals. We propose a novel approach to predict human gaze fixat…
We present hierarchical rejection sampling (HRS) to improve the efficiency of asymptotically optimal sampling-based planners for high-dimensional problems with differential constraints. Pruning nodes and rejecting samples that cannot improve the currently best solution have been shown to improve per…