13 accepted papers
Given the task of landing a ball in a goal region beyond direct reach, humans can often throw, slide, or rebound objects against the wall to attain the goal. Enabling robots to replicate such reasoning is non-trivial as it requires multi-step planning and involves a mixture of discrete and continuou
People with visual impairments rely on Electronic Travel Aids (ETAs), such as sensor-equipped guide canes, for safe and effective navigation. Misalignment or improper handling of these devices can reduce their effectiveness, increasing the risk of collisions and injuries. This paper presents an AIba
Imitation-based policy training for long-horizon manipulation tasks involving multi-step object interactions is often susceptible to compounding action errors. Contemporary methods discover semantic subgoals embedded within the overall task, decomposing the overall task into tractable shorter-horizo…
Manipulating unseen objects is challenging without a 3D representation, as objects generally have occluded surfaces. This requires physical interaction with objects to build their internal representations. This paper presents an approach that enables a robot to rapidly learn the complete 3D model of
Our goal is to enable a robot to learn how to sequence its actions to perform high-level tasks specified as natural language instructions, given successful demonstrations from a human partner. Our novel neuro-symbolic solution GOALNET builds an iterative two-step approach that interleaves (i) inferr…
Automatically detecting and recovering from failures is an important but challenging problem for autonomous robots. Most of the recent work on learning to plan from demonstrations lacks the ability to detect and recover from errors in the absence of an explicit state representation and/or a (sub-) g…
As robots tackle complex object arrangement tasks, it becomes imperative for them to be able to generalize to complex worlds and scale with number of objects. This work postulates that extracting action primitives, such as push operations, their pre-conditions and effects would enable strong general…
Given a natural language instruction and an input scene, our goal is to train a model to output a manipulation program that can be executed by the robot. Prior approaches for this task possess one of the following limitations: (i) rely on hand-coded symbols for concepts limiting generalization beyon…
Robots assisting us in factories or homes must learn to make use of objects as tools to perform tasks, e.g., a tray for carrying objects. We consider the problem of learning commonsense knowledge of when a tool may be useful and how its use may be composed with other tools to accomplish a high-level…
Recovering an unknown reward function for complex manipulation tasks is the fundamental problem of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL). Often, the recovered reward function fails to explicitly capture implicit constraints (e.g., axis alignment, force, or relative alignment) between the manipulator,
Consider a task such as pouring liquid from a cup into a container. Some parameters, such as the location of the pour, are crucial to task success, while others, such as the length of the pour, can exhibit larger variation. In this work, we propose a method that differentiates between specified task
Our goal is to enable robots to interpret and execute high-level tasks conveyed using natural language instructions. For example, consider tasking a household robot to, “prepare my breakfast”, “clear the boxes on the table” or “make me a fruit milkshake”. Interpreting such underspecified instruction
Our goal is to develop models that allow a robot to understand natural language instructions in the context of its world representation. Contemporary models learn possible correspondences between parsed instructions and candidate groundings that include objects, regions and motion constraints. Howev…