14,535 research outputs found
Social Attention: Modeling Attention in Human Crowds
Robots that navigate through human crowds need to be able to plan safe,
efficient, and human predictable trajectories. This is a particularly
challenging problem as it requires the robot to predict future human
trajectories within a crowd where everyone implicitly cooperates with each
other to avoid collisions. Previous approaches to human trajectory prediction
have modeled the interactions between humans as a function of proximity.
However, that is not necessarily true as some people in our immediate vicinity
moving in the same direction might not be as important as other people that are
further away, but that might collide with us in the future. In this work, we
propose Social Attention, a novel trajectory prediction model that captures the
relative importance of each person when navigating in the crowd, irrespective
of their proximity. We demonstrate the performance of our method against a
state-of-the-art approach on two publicly available crowd datasets and analyze
the trained attention model to gain a better understanding of which surrounding
agents humans attend to, when navigating in a crowd
A Tale of Two DRAGGNs: A Hybrid Approach for Interpreting Action-Oriented and Goal-Oriented Instructions
Robots operating alongside humans in diverse, stochastic environments must be
able to accurately interpret natural language commands. These instructions
often fall into one of two categories: those that specify a goal condition or
target state, and those that specify explicit actions, or how to perform a
given task. Recent approaches have used reward functions as a semantic
representation of goal-based commands, which allows for the use of a
state-of-the-art planner to find a policy for the given task. However, these
reward functions cannot be directly used to represent action-oriented commands.
We introduce a new hybrid approach, the Deep Recurrent Action-Goal Grounding
Network (DRAGGN), for task grounding and execution that handles natural
language from either category as input, and generalizes to unseen environments.
Our robot-simulation results demonstrate that a system successfully
interpreting both goal-oriented and action-oriented task specifications brings
us closer to robust natural language understanding for human-robot interaction.Comment: Accepted at the 1st Workshop on Language Grounding for Robotics at
ACL 201
A Tale of Two DRAGGNs: A Hybrid Approach for Interpreting Action-Oriented and Goal-Oriented Instructions
Robots operating alongside humans in diverse, stochastic environments must be
able to accurately interpret natural language commands. These instructions
often fall into one of two categories: those that specify a goal condition or
target state, and those that specify explicit actions, or how to perform a
given task. Recent approaches have used reward functions as a semantic
representation of goal-based commands, which allows for the use of a
state-of-the-art planner to find a policy for the given task. However, these
reward functions cannot be directly used to represent action-oriented commands.
We introduce a new hybrid approach, the Deep Recurrent Action-Goal Grounding
Network (DRAGGN), for task grounding and execution that handles natural
language from either category as input, and generalizes to unseen environments.
Our robot-simulation results demonstrate that a system successfully
interpreting both goal-oriented and action-oriented task specifications brings
us closer to robust natural language understanding for human-robot interaction.Comment: Accepted at the 1st Workshop on Language Grounding for Robotics at
ACL 201
Robotic ubiquitous cognitive ecology for smart homes
Robotic ecologies are networks of heterogeneous robotic devices pervasively embedded in everyday environments, where they cooperate to perform complex tasks. While their potential makes them increasingly popular, one fundamental problem is how to make them both autonomous and adaptive, so as to reduce the amount of preparation, pre-programming and human supervision that they require in real world applications. The project RUBICON develops learning solutions which yield cheaper, adaptive and efficient coordination of robotic ecologies. The approach we pursue builds upon a unique combination of methods from cognitive robotics, machine learning, planning and agent- based control, and wireless sensor networks. This paper illustrates the innovations advanced by RUBICON in each of these fronts before describing how the resulting techniques have been integrated and applied to a smart home scenario. The resulting system is able to provide useful services and pro-actively assist the users in their activities. RUBICON learns through an incremental and progressive approach driven by the feed- back received from its own activities and from the user, while also self-organizing the manner in which it uses available sensors, actuators and other functional components in the process. This paper summarises some of the lessons learned by adopting such an approach and outlines promising directions for future work
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