Remote robot manipulation with human control enables applications in which safety and environmental constraints are adverse to humans (e.g., underwater, space robotics and disaster response) or the complexity of the task demands human-level cognition and ...

Assistive robot arms try to help their users perform everyday tasks. One way robots can provide this assistance is shared autonomy. Within shared autonomy, both the human and robot maintain control over the robot’s motion: as the robot becomes confident ...

Shared autonomy can be beneficial in allowing users of assistive robots to refine the robot's behavior and ensure it is adapted to their needs. However, current methodologies mostly focus on using joysticks or physical pushes to modify robots' ...

We present a tool for modeling conflict situations that enables simulation and testing of situation awareness in shared autonomy, in this case in an autonomous driving scenario. The flexibility of the tool allows definition of new conflict situations, ...

Many industrial tasks-such as sanding, installing fasteners, and wire harnessing-are difficult to automate due to task complexity and variability. We instead investigate deploying robots in an assistive role for these tasks, where the robot assumes the ...

Shared control approaches to robot assistance, which predict a user's goal based on their control input and provide autonomous assistance towards the predicted goal, typically assume that user behavior remains the same despite the presence of the ...

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is an effective method for robots to learn tasks. However, in typical RL, end-users have little to no control over how the robot does the task after the robot has been deployed. To address this, we introduce the idea of online ...

As robots are introduced to various domains and applications, Human-Robot Teaming (HRT) capabilities are essential. Such capabilities involve teaming with humans in\ on\ out-the-loop at different levels of abstraction, leveraging the complementing ...

Advances in exoskeletons and robot arms have given us increasing opportunities for providing physical support and meaningful feedback in training and rehabilitation settings. However, the chosen control strategies must support motor learning and provide ...

Tele-nursing robots provide a safe approach for patient-caring in quarantine areas. For effective nurse–robot collaboration, ergonomic teleoperation and intuitive interfaces with low physical and cognitive workload must be developed. We propose a ...

We present the Human And Robot Multimodal Observations of Natural Interactive Collaboration (HARMONIC) dataset. This is a large multimodal dataset of human interactions with a robotic arm in a shared autonomy setting designed to imitate assistive eating. ...

Reliable, efficient shared autonomy requires balancing human operation and robot automation on complex tasks, such as dexterous manipulation. Adding to the difficulty of shared autonomy is a robot’s limited ability to perceive the 6 degree-of-freedom ...

Effective human-robot collaboration in shared autonomy requires reasoning about the intentions of the human partner. To provide meaningful assistance, the autonomy has to first correctly predict, or infer, the intended goal of the human collaborator. In ...

Robotic teleoperation can be a complex task due to factors such as high degree-of-freedom manipulators, operator inexperience, and limited operator situational awareness. To reduce teleoperation complexity, researchers have developed the shared autonomy ...

Shared autonomy systems enhance people's abilities to perform activities of daily living using robotic manipulators. Recent systems succeed by first identifying their operators' intentions, typically by analyzing the user's joystick input. To enhance ...

We present the deployment of a 16-DoF dual-arm mobile manipulator as an on-stage actor in the MIT2016 Pageant, a 60 minute live play performed for the centennial celebration of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus move from Boston to ...

Shared autonomy integrates user input with robot autonomy in order to control a robot and help the user to complete a task. Our work aims to improve the performance of such a human-robot team: the robot tries to guide the human towards an effective ...

We introduce image based visual servoing (IBVS) into a shared autonomy grasping system to improve its performance. Visual servoing is a technique that uses visual input to control a dynamic system, such as a robot. Autonomous grasp planning is used to ...

As robots begin to enter our homes and workplaces, they will have to deal with the devices and appliances that are already there. Unfortunately, devices that are easy for humans to operate often cause problems for robots [3]. In teleoperation settings, ...

In this paper, we explore a class of teleoperation problems where a user controls a sophisticated device (e.g. a robot) via an interface to perform a complex task. Teleoperation interfaces are fundamentally limited by the indirectness of the process, by ...