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Description
In a collaborative environment where multiple robots and human beings are expected

to collaborate to perform a task, it becomes essential for a robot to be aware of multiple

agents working in its work environment. A robot must also learn to adapt to

different agents in the workspace and conduct its interaction based

In a collaborative environment where multiple robots and human beings are expected

to collaborate to perform a task, it becomes essential for a robot to be aware of multiple

agents working in its work environment. A robot must also learn to adapt to

different agents in the workspace and conduct its interaction based on the presence

of these agents. A theoretical framework was introduced which performs interaction

learning from demonstrations in a two-agent work environment, and it is called

Interaction Primitives.

This document is an in-depth description of the new state of the art Python

Framework for Interaction Primitives between two agents in a single as well as multiple

task work environment and extension of the original framework in a work environment

with multiple agents doing a single task. The original theory of Interaction

Primitives has been extended to create a framework which will capture correlation

between more than two agents while performing a single task. The new state of the

art Python framework is an intuitive, generic, easy to install and easy to use python

library which can be applied to use the Interaction Primitives framework in a work

environment. This library was tested in simulated environments and controlled laboratory

environment. The results and benchmarks of this library are available in the

related sections of this document.
ContributorsKumar, Ashish, M.S (Author) / Amor, Hani Ben (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Yu (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful methodology for teaching autonomous agents complex behaviors and skills. A critical component in most RL algorithms is the reward function -- a mathematical function that provides numerical estimates for desirable and undesirable states. Typically, the reward function must be hand-designed by a human expert

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful methodology for teaching autonomous agents complex behaviors and skills. A critical component in most RL algorithms is the reward function -- a mathematical function that provides numerical estimates for desirable and undesirable states. Typically, the reward function must be hand-designed by a human expert and, as a result, the scope of a robot's autonomy and ability to safely explore and learn in new and unforeseen environments is constrained by the specifics of the designed reward function. In this thesis, I design and implement a stateful collision anticipation model with powerful predictive capability based upon my research of sequential data modeling and modern recurrent neural networks. I also develop deep reinforcement learning methods whose rewards are generated by self-supervised training and intrinsic signals. The main objective is to work towards the development of resilient robots that can learn to anticipate and avoid damaging interactions by combining visual and proprioceptive cues from internal sensors. The introduced solutions are inspired by pain pathways in humans and animals, because such pathways are known to guide decision-making processes and promote self-preservation. A new "robot dodge ball' benchmark is introduced in order to test the validity of the developed algorithms in dynamic environments.
ContributorsRichardson, Trevor W (Author) / Ben Amor, Heni (Thesis advisor) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Srivastava, Siddharth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
To ensure system integrity, robots need to proactively avoid any unwanted physical perturbation that may cause damage to the underlying hardware. In this thesis work, we investigate a machine learning approach that allows robots to anticipate impending physical perturbations from perceptual cues. In contrast to other approaches that require knowledge

To ensure system integrity, robots need to proactively avoid any unwanted physical perturbation that may cause damage to the underlying hardware. In this thesis work, we investigate a machine learning approach that allows robots to anticipate impending physical perturbations from perceptual cues. In contrast to other approaches that require knowledge about sources of perturbation to be encoded before deployment, our method is based on experiential learning. Robots learn to associate visual cues with subsequent physical perturbations and contacts. In turn, these extracted visual cues are then used to predict potential future perturbations acting on the robot. To this end, we introduce a novel deep network architecture which combines multiple sub- networks for dealing with robot dynamics and perceptual input from the environment. We present a self-supervised approach for training the system that does not require any labeling of training data. Extensive experiments in a human-robot interaction task show that a robot can learn to predict physical contact by a human interaction partner without any prior information or labeling. Furthermore, the network is able to successfully predict physical contact from either depth stream input or traditional video input or using both modalities as input.
ContributorsSur, Indranil (Author) / Amor, Heni B (Thesis advisor) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
Visual navigation is a useful and important task for a variety of applications. As the preva­lence of robots increase, there is an increasing need for energy-­efficient navigation methods as well. Many aspects of efficient visual navigation algorithms have been implemented in the lit­erature, but there is a lack of work

Visual navigation is a useful and important task for a variety of applications. As the preva­lence of robots increase, there is an increasing need for energy-­efficient navigation methods as well. Many aspects of efficient visual navigation algorithms have been implemented in the lit­erature, but there is a lack of work on evaluation of the efficiency of the image sensors. In this thesis, two methods are evaluated: adaptive image sensor quantization for traditional camera pipelines as well as new event­-based sensors for low­-power computer vision.The first contribution in this thesis is an evaluation of performing varying levels of sen­sor linear and logarithmic quantization with the task of visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). This unconventional method can provide efficiency benefits with a trade­ off between accuracy of the task and energy-­efficiency. A new sensor quantization method, gradient­-based quantization, is introduced to improve the accuracy of the task. This method only lowers the bit level of parts of the image that are less likely to be important in the SLAM algorithm since lower bit levels signify better energy­-efficiency, but worse task accuracy. The third contribution is an evaluation of the efficiency and accuracy of event­-based camera inten­sity representations for the task of optical flow. The results of performing a learning based optical flow are provided for each of five different reconstruction methods along with ablation studies. Lastly, the challenges of an event feature­-based SLAM system are presented with re­sults demonstrating the necessity for high quality and high­ resolution event data. The work in this thesis provides studies useful for examining trade­offs for an efficient visual navigation system with traditional and event vision sensors. The results of this thesis also provide multiple directions for future work.
ContributorsChristie, Olivia Catherine (Author) / Jayasuriya, Suren (Thesis advisor) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
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Description
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) has traditionally relied on low-level geometric or optical features. However, these features-based SLAM methods often struggle with feature-less or repetitive scenes. Additionally, low-level features may not provide sufficient information for robot navigation and manipulation, leaving robots without a complete understanding of the 3D spatial world.

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) has traditionally relied on low-level geometric or optical features. However, these features-based SLAM methods often struggle with feature-less or repetitive scenes. Additionally, low-level features may not provide sufficient information for robot navigation and manipulation, leaving robots without a complete understanding of the 3D spatial world. Advanced information is necessary to address these limitations. Fortunately, recent developments in learning-based 3D reconstruction allow robots to not only detect semantic meanings, but also recognize the 3D structure of objects from a few images. By combining this 3D structural information, SLAM can be improved from a low-level approach to a structure-aware approach. This work propose a novel approach for multi-view 3D reconstruction using recurrent transformer. This approach allows robots to accumulate information from multiple views and encode them into a compact latent space. The resulting latent representations are then decoded to produce 3D structural landmarks, which can be used to improve robot localization and mapping.
ContributorsHuang, Chi-Yao (Author) / Yang, Yezhou (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Jayasuriya, Suren (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
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Description
Enabling robots to physically engage with their environment in a safe and efficient manner is an essential step towards human-robot interaction. To date, robots usually operate as pre-programmed workers that blindly execute tasks in highly structured environments crafted by skilled engineers. Changing the robots’ behavior to cover new duties or

Enabling robots to physically engage with their environment in a safe and efficient manner is an essential step towards human-robot interaction. To date, robots usually operate as pre-programmed workers that blindly execute tasks in highly structured environments crafted by skilled engineers. Changing the robots’ behavior to cover new duties or handle variability is an expensive, complex, and time-consuming process. However, with the advent of more complex sensors and algorithms, overcoming these limitations becomes within reach. This work proposes innovations in artificial intelligence, language understanding, and multimodal integration to enable next-generation grasping and manipulation capabilities in autonomous robots. The underlying thesis is that multimodal observations and instructions can drastically expand the responsiveness and dexterity of robot manipulators. Natural language, in particular, can be used to enable intuitive, bidirectional communication between a human user and the machine. To this end, this work presents a system that learns context-aware robot control policies from multimodal human demonstrations. Among the main contributions presented are techniques for (a) collecting demonstrations in an efficient and intuitive fashion, (b) methods for leveraging physical contact with the environment and objects, (c) the incorporation of natural language to understand context, and (d) the generation of robust robot control policies. The presented approach and systems are evaluated in multiple grasping and manipulation settings ranging from dexterous manipulation to pick-and-place, as well as contact-rich bimanual insertion tasks. Moreover, the usability of these innovations, especially when utilizing human task demonstrations and communication interfaces, is evaluated in several human-subject studies.
ContributorsStepputtis, Simon (Author) / Ben Amor, Heni (Thesis advisor) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Lee, Stefan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
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Description
Autonomous systems that are out in the real world today deal with a slew of different data modalities to perform effectively in tasks ranging from robot navigation in complex maneuverable robots to identity verification in simpler static systems. The performance of the system heavily banks on the continuous supply of

Autonomous systems that are out in the real world today deal with a slew of different data modalities to perform effectively in tasks ranging from robot navigation in complex maneuverable robots to identity verification in simpler static systems. The performance of the system heavily banks on the continuous supply of data from all modalities. These systems can face drastically increased risk with the loss of one or multiple modalities due to an adverse scenario like that of hardware malfunction, inimical environmental conditions, etc. This thesis investigates modality hallucination and its efficacy in mitigating the risks posed to the autonomous system. Modality hallucination is proposed as one effective way to ensure consistent modality availability thereby reducing unfavorable consequences. While there has been a significant research effort in high-to-low dimensional modality hallucination, like that of RGB to depth, there is considerably lesser interest in the other direction( low-to-high dimensional modality prediction). This thesis serves to demonstrate the effectiveness of this low-to-high modality hallucination in reducing the uncertainty in the affected system while also ensuring that the method remains task agnostic.

A deep neural network based encoder-decoder architecture that aggregates multiple fields of view in its encoder blocks to recover the lost information of the affected modality from the extant modality is presented with evidence of its efficacy. The hallucination process is implemented by capturing a non-linear mapping between the data modalities and the learned mapping is used to aid the extant modality to mitigate the risk posed to the system in the adverse scenarios which involve modality loss. The results are compared with a well known generative model built for the task of image translation, as well as an off-the-shelf semantic segmentation architecture re-purposed for hallucination. To validate the practicality of hallucinated modality, extensive classification and segmentation experiments are conducted on the University of Washington's depth image database (UWRGBD) database and the New York University database (NYUD) and demonstrate that hallucination indeed lessens the negative effects of the modality loss.
ContributorsGunasekar, Kausic (Author) / Yang, Yezhou (Thesis advisor) / Qiu, Qiang (Committee member) / Amor, Heni Ben (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
In a multi-robot system, locating a team robot is an important issue. If robots

can refer to the location of team robots based on information through passive action

recognition without explicit communication, various advantages (e.g. improving security

for military purposes) can be obtained. Specifically, when team robots follow

the same motion rule based on

In a multi-robot system, locating a team robot is an important issue. If robots

can refer to the location of team robots based on information through passive action

recognition without explicit communication, various advantages (e.g. improving security

for military purposes) can be obtained. Specifically, when team robots follow

the same motion rule based on information about adjacent robots, associations can

be found between robot actions. If the association can be analyzed, this can be a clue

to the remote robot. Using these clues, it is possible to infer remote robots which are

outside of the sensor range.

In this paper, a multi-robot system is constructed using a combination of Thymio

II robotic platforms and Raspberry pi controllers. Robots moving in chain-formation

take action using motion rules based on information obtained through passive action

recognition. To find associations between robots, a regression model is created using

Deep Neural Network (DNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), one of state-of-art technologies.

The input data of the regression model is divided into historical data, which

are consecutive positions of the robot, and observed data, which is information about the

observed robot. Historical data is sequence data that is analyzed through the LSTM

layer. The accuracy of the regression model designed using DNN can vary depending

on the quantity and quality of the input. In this thesis, three different input situations

are assumed for comparison. First, the amount of observed data is different, second, the

type of observed data is different, and third, the history length is different. Comparative

models are constructed for each case, and prediction accuracy is compared to analyze

the effect of input data on the regression model. This exploration validates that these

methods from deep learning can reduce the communication demands in coordinated

motion of multi-robot systems
ContributorsKang, Sehyeok (Author) / Pavlic, Theodore P (Thesis advisor) / Richa, Andréa W. (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
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Description
In order for a robot to solve complex tasks in real world, it needs to compute discrete, high-level strategies that can be translated into continuous movement trajectories. These problems become increasingly difficult with increasing numbers of objects and domain constraints, as well as with the increasing degrees of freedom of

In order for a robot to solve complex tasks in real world, it needs to compute discrete, high-level strategies that can be translated into continuous movement trajectories. These problems become increasingly difficult with increasing numbers of objects and domain constraints, as well as with the increasing degrees of freedom of robotic manipulator arms.

The first part of this thesis develops and investigates new methods for addressing these problems through hierarchical task and motion planning for manipulation with a focus on autonomous construction of free-standing structures using precision-cut planks. These planks can be arranged in various orientations to design complex structures; reliably and autonomously building such structures from scratch is computationally intractable due to the long planning horizon and the infinite branching factor of possible grasps and placements that the robot could make.

An abstract representation is developed for this class of problems and show how pose generators can be used to autonomously compute feasible robot motion plans for constructing a given structure. The approach was evaluated through simulation and on a real ABB YuMi robot. Results show that hierarchical algorithms for planning can effectively overcome the computational barriers to solving such problems.

The second part of this thesis proposes a deep learning-based algorithm to identify critical regions for motion planning. Further investigation is done whether these learned critical regions can be translated to learn high-level landmark actions for automated planning.
ContributorsKumar, Kislay (Author) / Srivastava, Siddharth (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Yu (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
The goal of reinforcement learning is to enable systems to autonomously solve tasks in the real world, even in the absence of prior data. To succeed in such situations, reinforcement learning algorithms collect new experience through interactions with the environment to further the learning process. The behaviour is optimized

The goal of reinforcement learning is to enable systems to autonomously solve tasks in the real world, even in the absence of prior data. To succeed in such situations, reinforcement learning algorithms collect new experience through interactions with the environment to further the learning process. The behaviour is optimized by maximizing a reward function, which assigns high numerical values to desired behaviours. Especially in robotics, such interactions with the environment are expensive in terms of the required execution time, human involvement, and mechanical degradation of the system itself. Therefore, this thesis aims to introduce sample-efficient reinforcement learning methods which are applicable to real-world settings and control tasks such as bimanual manipulation and locomotion. Sample efficiency is achieved through directed exploration, either by using dimensionality reduction or trajectory optimization methods. Finally, it is demonstrated how data-efficient reinforcement learning methods can be used to optimize the behaviour and morphology of robots at the same time.
ContributorsLuck, Kevin Sebastian (Author) / Ben Amor, Hani (Thesis advisor) / Aukes, Daniel (Committee member) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Scholz, Jonathan (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019