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Building robust and reliable autonomous navigation systems that generalize across environments and operating scenarios remains a core challenge in robotics. Machine learning has proven a significant aid in this task; in recent years learning from demonstration has become especially popular, leading to improved systems while requiring less expert tuning and interaction. However, these approaches still...
We present experiments on the application of machine learning to predicting slip. The sensing information is provided by a force/torque sensor and an artificial finger, which has randomly distributed strain gauges and polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) films embedded in silicone resulting in multidimensional time-series data on the finger-object contact. An incipient slip is detected by studying temporal...
This paper extends the novel research for event localization and target-directed navigation using a deployed wireless sensor network (WSN) [4]. The goal is to have an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) navigate to a target-location by: (i) producing an artificial magnitude distribution within the WSN-covered region, and (ii) having the AMR use the pseudo-gradient from the interpolated distribution in its...
BECCA (a Brain-Emulating Cognition and Control Architecture software package) was developed in order to perform general reinforcement learning, that is, to enable unmodeled embodied systems operating in unstructured environments to perform unfamiliar tasks. It accomplishes this through automatic paired feature creation and reinforcement learning algorithms. This paper describes an implementation of...
To be a good helper, grasping and manipulation are the most important abilities of a service robot. It should be able to adapt its manipulation actions to new tasks and environments. During the execution, it is important to rate the success of actions, so that the robot can plan and execute further actions to correct and recover from the failed actions.
This paper presents a hierarchal, two-layer, connectionist-based human-action recognition system (CHARS) as a first step towards developing socially intelligent robots. The first layer is a K-nearest neighbor (K-NN) classifier that categorizes human actions into two classes based on the existence of locomotion, and the second layer consists of two multi-layer recurrent neural networks that distinguish...
The language is a symbolic system unique to human being. The acquisition of language, which has its meanings in the real world, is important for robots to understand the environment and communicate with us in our daily life. This paper proposes a novel approach to establish a fundamental framework for the robots which can understand language through their whole body motions. The proposed framework...
In this work we address the problem of feature extraction for object recognition in the context of cameras providing RGB and depth information (RGB-D data). We consider this problem in a bag of features like setting and propose a new, learned, local feature descriptor for RGB-D images, the convolutional k-means descriptor. The descriptor is based on recent results from the machine learning community...
We propose a view-based approach for labeling objects in 3D scenes reconstructed from RGB-D (color+depth) videos. We utilize sliding window detectors trained from object views to assign class probabilities to pixels in every RGB-D frame. These probabilities are projected into the reconstructed 3D scene and integrated using a voxel representation. We perform efficient inference on a Markov Random Field...
Detecting cars in real-world images is an important task for autonomous driving, yet it remains unsolved. The system described in this paper takes advantage of context and scale to build a monocular single-frame image-based car detector that significantly outperforms the baseline. The system uses a probabilistic model to combine multiple forms of evidence for both context and scale to locate cars...
Detecting grasping points is a key problem in cloth manipulation. Most current approaches follow a multiple re-grasp strategy for this purpose, in which clothes are sequentially grasped from different points until one of them yields to a desired configuration. In this paper, by contrast, we circumvent the need for multiple re-graspings by building a robust detector that identifies the grasping points,...
Learning about new objects that a robot sees for the first time is a difficult problem because it is not clear how to define the concept of object in general terms. In this paper we consider as objects those physical entities that are comprised of features which move consistently when the robot acts upon them. Among the possible actions that a robot could apply to a hypothetical object, pushing seems...
The ability to perceive possible interactions with the environment is a key capability of task-guided robotic agents. An important subset of possible interactions depends solely on the objects of interest and their position and orientation in the scene. We call these object-based interactions 0-order affordances and divide them among non-hidden and hidden whether the current configuration of an object...
This paper presents WISS, a speaker identification system for mobile robots integrated to ManyEars, a sound source localization, tracking and separation system. Speaker identification consists in recognizing an individual among a group of known speakers. For mobile robots, performing speaker identification in presence of noise that changes over time is one important challenge. To deal with this issue,...
A major goal of current robotics research is to enable robots to become co-workers that collaborate with humans efficiently and adapt to changing environments or workflows. We present an approach utilizing the physical interaction capabilities of compliant robots with data-driven and model-free learning in a coherent system in order to make fast reconfiguration of redundant robots feasible. Users...
The studies on mirror neurons observed in monkeys indicate that recognition of other's actions activates neural circuits that are also responsible for generating the very same actions in the animal. The mirror neuron hypothesis argues that such an overlap between action generation and recognition can provide a shared worldview among individuals and be a key pillar for communication. Inspired by these...
Reaching and grasping of objects in an everyday-life environment seems so simple for humans, though so complicated from an engineering point of view. Humans use a variety of strategies for reaching and grasping anything from the simplest to the most complicated objects, achieving high dexterity and efficiency. This seemingly simple process of reach-to-grasp relies on the complex coordination of the...
In this paper, we propose to use distributed support vector machine (SVM) training to solve a multi-target tracking problem in wireless sensor networks. We employ gossip-based incremental SVM to obtain the discriminant function. By gossiping the support vectors with neighboring sensor nodes, the local SVM training results can achieve the agreement of the sub-optimal discriminant planes. After training...
A novel method for controlling a robotic mobility platform, the WeeBot, is presented. The WeeBot permits an infant seated on the robot to control its motion by leaning in the direction of desired movement. The WeeBot hardware and software are discussed and the results of a pilot feasibility study are presented. This study shows that after five training sessions typically developing infants ages six...
Rehabilitation robotic devices have been actively explored for training patients with impaired neural functions or assisting those with weak limbs due to aging or diseases. In recent years, the authors have proposed light-weight exoskeleton designs for the upper arm, in which rigid links of the exoskeleton are replaced by lightweight cuffs attached to the moving limb segments of the human arm. Cables,...
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