This study investigates the effects of culture, robot appearance and task on human-robot interaction. We propose a model with culture (Chinese, Korean and German), robot appearance (anthropomorphic, zoomorphic and machinelike) and task (teaching, guide, entertainment and security guard) as factors, and analyze these factors’ effects on the robot’s likeability, and people’s active response to, e...

This work seeks to leverage semantic networks containing millions of entries encoding assertions of commonsense knowledge to enable improvements in robot task execution and learning. The specific application we explore in this project is object substitution in the context of task adaptation. Humans easily adapt their plans to compensate for missing items in day-to-day tasks, substituting a wrap...

A service robot requires natural and interactive interaction with users without explicit commands. It is still one of the difficult problems to generate robust reactions for the robot in the real environment with unreliable sensor data to satisfy user’s requests. This paper presents an intention-response model based on mirror neuron and theory of mind, and analyzes the performance for a humanoi...

When robots are working in dynamic environments, close to humans lacking extensive knowledge of robotics, there is a strong need to simplify the user interaction and make the system execute as autonomously as possible. For industrial robots working side-by-side with humans in manufacturing industry, AI systems are necessary to lower the demand on programming time and expertise. We are convinced...

Robot systems must achieve high level goals while remaining reactive to contingencies and new opportunities. This typically requires robot systems to coordinate concurrent activities, monitor the environment, and deal with exceptions. We have developed a new language to support such task-level control. The language, TDL, is an extension of C++ that provides syntactic support for task decomposit...

Imitation learning is an effective method for interactively teaching a robot learner to complete a task. We address the problem of transfer for robotic agents that learn tasks from demonstrations, where a robot is asked to adapt a learned task to be repeated in a related, but unfamiliar, environment. We take a case-based approach to transfer, where the robot learner stores individual task demon...

mobile robot navigation is one of the basic problems in robotics. in this paper, a new approachis proposed for autonomous mobile robot navigation in an unknown environment. the proposedapproach is based on learning virtual parallel paths that propel the mobile robot toward the trackusing a multi-layer, feed-forward neural network. for training, a human operator navigates themobile robot in some...

The paper focuses on specification and utilization of manipulation skills to facilitate programming of bimanual manipulation tasks. Manipulation skills are actions to reach predefined goals. They constitute an interface between lowlevel constraint-based task specification and high level symbolic task planning. The task of the robot can be decomposed into subtasks that can be resolved using mani...

Based on the RHHex hexapod robot, the AQUA robot is an aquatic robot that swims via the motion of its legs, rather than using thrusters and control surfaces for propulsion. Through an appropriate set of gaits, the AQUA vehicle is capable of five-degree-of-freedom motion in the open water, it can swim along the surface and it can walk along the seabed. The vehicle itself is augmented with a vari...

According to the principles of embodied cognition, intelligent behavior must arise out of the coupled dynamics of an agent’s brain, body, and environment. This suggests that the morphological complexity of a robot should scale in relation to the complexity of its task environment. This idea is supported by recent work, which demonstrated that when evolving robot morphologies in simple and compl...