13 accepted papers
We present DIJIT, a novel binocular robotic head expressly designed for mobile agents that behave as active observers. DIJIT's unique breadth of functionality enables active vision research and the study of human-like eye and head-neck motions, their interrelationships, and how each contributes to v
Gesture-based communication is a standard underwater communication strategy that is taught to divers as part of their regular diver training and it would seem a natural mechanism to leverage for diver to robot communication underwater. Enabling an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) to understand such
Visual-tactile sensing affords abundant capabilities for contact-rich object manipulation tasks including grasping and placing. Here we introduce a shape-from-texture inspired contact shape estimation approach for visual-tactile sensors equipped with visually distinct membrane markers. Under a persp
Speech emotion recognition (SER) is the task of automatically recognizing emotions expressed in spoken language. Current approaches focus on analyzing isolated speech segments to identify a speaker’s emotional state. Meanwhile, recent text-based emotion recognition methods have effectively shifted t…
Traffic signal control (TSC) has seen substantial advancements through the application of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, which have shown remarkable potential in enhancing traffic flow efficiency. These RL-based approaches often surpass traditional rule-based methods, particularly in dynami
Our work examines the way in which large language models can be used for robotic planning and sampling in the context of automated photographic documentation. Specifically, we illustrate how to produce a photo-taking robot with an exceptional level of semantic awareness by leveraging recent advances…
This paper introduces and develops novel touch sensing technologies that enable robots to better sense and react to to intermittent contact interactions. We present Finger-STS, a robotic finger embodiment of the See-Through-your-Skin (STS) sensor that can capture 1) an “in the hand” visual perspecti
In this paper, we present the Sample Efficient Social Navigation from Observation (SESNO) algorithm that efficiently learns socially-compliant navigation policies from observations of human trajectories. SESNO is an inverse reinforcement learning (IRL)-based algorithm that learns from human trajecto…
Manipulating objects with dexterity requires timely feedback that simultaneously leverages the senses of vision and touch. In this paper, we focus on the problem setting where both visual and tactile sensors provide pixel-level feedback for Visuotactile reinforcement learning agents. We investigate…
Predicting the future interaction of objects when they come into contact with their environment is key for autonomous agents to take intelligent and anticipatory actions. This paper presents a perception framework that fuses visual and tactile feedback to make predictions about the expected motion…
Although existing cellular network base stations are typically immobile, the recent development of small form factor base stations and self driving cars has enabled the possibility of deploying a team of continuously moving base stations that can reorganize the network infrastructure to adapt to cha…
Robot-diver communication underwater is complicated by the attenuation of RF signals, the complexities of the environment in terms of deploying interaction devices, and issues related to the cognitive loading of human operators. Humans operating underwater have developed a simple yet effective strat…
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is a key stepping stone on the road to truly autonomous robots. SLAM is of particular importance to robots with large motion estimation problems, such as robots operating on the surface of aquatic GPS-denied environments where a paucity of local landmarks…