35 accepted papers
Conventional human-in-the-loop approaches typically involve users only when a robot encounters failure or uncertainty, treating humans primarily as tools to improve robot performance. However, in many human-centered robotics settings, interaction should support user engagement, keeping users meaning…
Physical caregiving robots need to assist different users with different tasks in diverse environments, and they come in many embodiments. While substantial progress has been made on individual caregiving tasks, most existing systems remain tightly coupled to specific environments and robot embodime…
Robots that physically interact with humans must decide not only how and when to help, but also when not to help. In physical caregiving and collaborative manipulation, robots can over-assist by misestimating user capability or defaulting to helping when users can act independently. Physical functio…
Robots operating in unstructured environments must satisfy dynamic constraints that can change across tasks and even within a single execution. While diffusion policies can learn multimodal behaviors from demonstrations, adapting a trained policy at runtime to newly encountered or evolving constrain…
Whole-arm manipulation involves direct contact with the environment while the robot completes a task by distributing contact across multiple links as contacts form, slide, and break. This setting breaks common implicit assumptions in many learning-based manipulation pipelines: arm configuration tigh…
Robust robot manipulation in unstructured environments often requires understanding object properties that extend beyond geometry, such as material or compliance—properties that can be challenging to infer using vision alone. Multimodal haptic sensing provides a promising avenue for inferring such p…
Physical caregiving robots hold promise for improving the quality of life of millions worldwide who require assistance with feeding. However, in-home meal assistance remains challenging due to the diversity of activities (e.g., eating, drinking, mouth wiping), contexts (e.g., socializing, watching T…
We present OpenRoboCare, a multimodal dataset for robot caregiving, capturing expert occupational therapist demonstrations of Activities of Daily Living (ADLs). Caregiving tasks involve complex physical human-robot interactions, requiring precise perception under occlusions, safe physical contact, a
Many robot caregiving tasks, such as bathing, dressing, and transferring, require a robot arm to make contact with a human body at multiple points rather than solely at the end effector. However, varied human touch preferences can lead to unsafe or uncomfortable multi-contact interactions. To addres…
Robot-assisted feeding requires reliable bite acquisition, a challenging task due to the complex interactions between utensils and food with diverse physical properties. These interactions are further complicated by the temporal variability of food properties—for example, steak becomes firm as it co…
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
Whole-arm tactile feedback is crucial for robots to ensure safe physical interaction with their surroundings. This paper introduces CushSense, a fabric-based soft and stretchable tactile-sensing skin designed for physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) tasks such as robotic caregiving. Using stretch…
Robot-assisted feeding holds immense promise for improving the quality of life for individuals with mobility limitations who are unable to feed themselves independently. However, there exists a large gap between the kinds of homogeneous, curated plates existing assistive feeding systems can handle,…
Meal preparation is an important instrumental activity of daily living (IADL). While existing research has explored robotic assistance in meal preparation tasks such as cutting and cooking, the crucial task of peeling has received less attention. Robot-assisted peeling, conventionally a bimanual tas…
The paper presents REPeat, a Real2Sim2Real framework designed to enhance bite acquisition in robot-assisted feeding for soft foods. It uses ‘pre-acquisition actions’ such as pushing, cutting, and flipping to improve the success rate of bite acquisition actions such as skewering, scooping, and twirli…
Robot-assisted feeding in household environments is challenging because it requires robots to generate trajectories that effectively bring food items of varying shapes and sizes into the mouth while making sure the user is comfortable. Our key insight is that in order to solve this challenge, robots…
Dexterous manipulation is a challenging and important problem in robotics. While data-driven methods are a promising approach, current benchmarks require simulation or extensive engineering support due to the sample inefficiency of popular methods. We present benchmarks for the TriFinger system, an
We develop data-driven models to predict when a robot should feed during social dining scenarios. Being able to eat independently with friends and family is considered one of the most memorable and important activities for people with mobility limitations. While existing robotic systems for feeding…
Learning intricate manipulation skills from human demonstrations requires good sample efficiency. We introduce a novel learning algorithm, the Curvature-regularized Variational Auto-Encoder (CurvVAE), to achieve this goal. The CurvVAE is able to model the natural variations in human-demonstrated tra…
We present RCareWorld, a human-centric simulation world for physical and social robotic caregiving designed with inputs from stakeholders. RCareWorld has realistic human models of care recipients with mobility limitations and caregivers, home environments with multiple levels of accessibility and as…
Existing work in physical robot caregiving is limited in its ability to provide long-term assistance. This is majorly due to (i) lack of well-defined problems, (ii) diversity of tasks, and (iii) limited access to stakeholders from the caregiving community. We propose Structuring Physically Assistive…
Cursor-based tele-operation interfaces for manipulators can enable widely available and accessible control of robots to make many near term applications possible. However, their efficiency is restricted by the challenge of controlling 6 Degrees-of-Freedom (DoF) with 2D input from the cursor. Existin…
Billions of people use chopsticks, a simple yet versatile tool, for fine manipulation of everyday objects. The small, curved, and slippery tips of chopsticks pose a challenge for picking up small objects, making them a suitably complex test case. This paper leverages human demonstrations to develop…
Autonomous robot-assisted feeding requires the ability to acquire a wide variety of food items. However, it is impossible for such a system to be trained on all types of food in existence. Therefore, a key challenge is choosing a manipulation strategy for a previously unseen food item. Previous work…
A successful robot-assisted feeding system requires bite acquisition of a wide variety of food items. It must adapt to changing user food preferences under uncertain visual and physical environments. Different food items in different environmental conditions require different manipulation strategies…
Chopsticks constitute a simple yet versatile tool that humans have used for thousands of years to perform a variety of challenging tasks ranging from food manipulation to surgery. Applying such a simple tool in a diverse repertoire of scenarios requires significant adaptability. Towards developing a…
Autonomous assistive feeding systems need to acquire deformable food items of varying physical characteristics to be able to feed users. However, bite acquisition of these deformable food items is challenging without force feedback of appropriate range and sensitivity. We developed custom solutions…
Autonomous feeding is challenging because it requires the manipulation of food items with various compliance, sizes, and shapes. To understand how humans manipulate food items during feeding and to explore ways to adapt their strategies to robots, we collected a rich dataset of human trajectories by
When operating in human environments, such as homes, robots could use tactile sensing to better perceive objects. A challenge that has not been sufficiently addressed is the influence of an object's surroundings on tactile perception. Prior research has focused on perception of objects in laboratory
By briefly heating the local environment with a heat lamp and observing what happens with a thermal camera, robots could potentially infer properties of their surroundings. However, this form of active thermography introduces large signal variations compared to traditional active thermography, which…
Robots could benefit from maps that represent haptic properties of their surroundings. By touching locations with tactile sensors, robots can infer haptic properties of their surroundings, but touching all locations would be prohibitive. We present an algorithm that uses touch and vision to efficien…
Online detection of anomalous execution can be valuable for robot manipulation, enabling robots to operate more safely, determine when a behavior is inappropriate, and otherwise exhibit more common sense. By using multiple complementary sensory modalities, robots could potentially detect a wider var
Robots are ever more present in human environments and effective physical human-robot interactions are essential to many applications. But to a person, these interactions rarely feel biological or equivalent to a human-human interactions. It is our goal to make robots feel more human-like, in the ho…
We consider the problem of enabling a robot to efficiently obtain a dense haptic map of its visible surroundings using the complementary properties of vision and tactile sensing. Our approach assumes that visible surfaces that look similar to one another are likely to have similar haptic properties.…
When making contact with an object, a robot can use a tactile sensor consisting of a heating element and a temperature sensor to recognize the object's material based on conductive heat transfer from the tactile sensor to the object. When this type of tactile sensor has time to fully reheat prior to…