17 accepted papers
Multi-robot supervision becomes increasingly cognitively demanding as the ratio of robots to human supervisors rises, potentially leading to situational awareness (SA) losses and robot system failures. Nonverbal cues have been employed to direct supervisor attention and prevent awareness loss in div…
In agricultural robotics, effective observation and localization of fruits present challenges due to occlusions caused by other parts of the tree, such as branches and leaves. These occlusions can result in false fruit localization or impede the robot from picking the fruit. The objective of this wo…
We propose a robotic manipulation method that can pivot objects on a surface using vision, wrist force and tactile sensing. We aim to control the rotation of an object around the grip point of a parallel gripper by allowing rotational slip, while maintaining a desired wrist force profile. Our approa…
Research in biomechanics hypothesizes that human motion is optimal with respect to an unknown cost function that varies depending on the action and/or task. This unknown cost function is often approximated as the weighted sum of a set of features or basis cost functions. As a person performs a seque…
A promising characteristic of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is its capability to learn optimal policy in an end-to-end manner without relying on feature engineering. However, most approaches assume a fully observable state space, i.e. fully observable Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In real-wo…
Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) user studies are challenging to evaluate and compare due to a lack of standardization and the infrastructure required to implement each study. The lack of experimental infrastructure also makes it difficult to systematically evaluate the impact of individual components…
We study active preference learning as a frame-work for intuitively specifying the behaviour of autonomous robots. A user chooses the preferred behaviour from a set of alternatives, from which the robot learns the user's preferences, modeled as a parameterized cost function. Previous approaches pres…
Enabling a broader range of users to efficiently deploy autonomous mobile robots requires intuitive frameworks for specifying a robot's task and behaviour. We present a novel approach using learning from corrections (LfC), where a user is iteratively presented with a solution to a motion planning pr…
The increasing presence of robots alongside humans, such as in human-robot teams in manufacturing, gives rise to research questions about the kind of behaviors people prefer in their robot counterparts. We term actions that support interaction by reducing future interference with others as supportiv…
In this paper we develop an approach for learning user preferences for complex task specifications through human-robot interaction. We consider the problem of planning robot motion in a known environment, but where a user has specified additional spatial and temporal constraints on allowable robot m…
One of the main challenges of bipedal gait is to avoid falling due to unknown disturbances. Compensating for these disturbances in bipeds is often achieved by leaning or stepping. In this work, the Spherical Foot Placement Estimator (SFPE) is introduced, which uses the biped's current kinematics and…
The ability to accurately identify human activities is essential for developing automatic rehabilitation and sports training systems. In this paper, large-scale exercise motion data obtained from a forearm-worn wearable sensor are classified with a convolutional neural network (CNN). Time-series dat…
Inertial measurement units (IMUs) enable human motion measurement in any environment, which can be useful for human robot interaction, exoskeletons, and active prosthetics. This paper proposes an approach for estimating the orientation between a wearable IMU sensor and the body frame of the wearer u…
This paper proposes a new algorithm for human motion estimation using inertial measurement unit (IMU) measurements. We model the joints by matrix Lie groups, namely the special orthogonal groups SO(2) and SO(3), representing rotations in 2D and 3D space, respectively. The state space is defined by t…
In this paper we present a real-time method for identification of the dynamic parameters of a manipulator and its load using kinematic measurements and either joint torques or force and moment at the base. The parameters are estimated using the Extended Kalman Filter and constraints are imposed usin…
This paper investigates the design and implementation of a finger-like robotic structure capable of reproducing human hand gestural movements performed by a multi-fingered, hand-like structure. In this work, we present a pneumatic circuit and a closed-loop controller for a finger-like soft pneumatic…
Soft pneumatic artificial muscles (SPAMs) are a type of pneumatic actuator that provide customizable motion trajectories in three dimensional space without the need for rigid links or a transmission mechanism. This paper presents a novel design for producing SPAMs, named wrapped SPAMs (WSPAMs). Unli…