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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
Students learn in various ways \u2014 visualization, auditory, memorizing, or making analogies. Traditional lecturing in engineering courses and the learning styles of engineering students are inharmonious causing students to be at a disadvantage based on their learning style (Felder & Silverman, 1988). My study analyzes the traditional approach to learning

Students learn in various ways \u2014 visualization, auditory, memorizing, or making analogies. Traditional lecturing in engineering courses and the learning styles of engineering students are inharmonious causing students to be at a disadvantage based on their learning style (Felder & Silverman, 1988). My study analyzes the traditional approach to learning coding skills which is unnatural to engineering students with no previous exposure and examining if visual learning enhances introductory computer science education. Visual and text-based learning are evaluated to determine how students learn introductory coding skills and associated problem solving skills. My study was conducted to observe how the two types of learning aid the students in learning how to problem solve as well as how much knowledge can be obtained in a short period of time. The application used for visual learning was Scratch and Repl.it was used for text-based learning. Two exams were made to measure the progress made by each student. The topics covered by the exam were initialization, variable reassignment, output, if statements, if else statements, nested if statements, logical operators, arrays/lists, while loop, type casting, functions, object orientation, and sorting. Analysis of the data collected in the study allow us to observe whether the traditional method of teaching programming or block-based programming is more beneficial and in what topics of introductory computer science concepts.
ContributorsVidaure, Destiny Vanessa (Author) / Meuth, Ryan (Thesis director) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
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Description
As robotics technology advances, robots are being created for use in situations where they collaborate with humans on complex tasks.  For this to be safe and successful, it is important to understand what causes humans to trust robots more or less during a collaborative task.  This research project aims to

As robotics technology advances, robots are being created for use in situations where they collaborate with humans on complex tasks.  For this to be safe and successful, it is important to understand what causes humans to trust robots more or less during a collaborative task.  This research project aims to investigate human-robot trust through a collaborative game of logic that can be played with a human and a robot together. This thesis details the development of a game of logic that could be used for this purpose. The game of logic is based upon a popular game in AI research called ‘Wumpus World’. The original Wumpus World game was a low-interactivity game to be played by humans alone. In this project, the Wumpus World game is modified for a high degree of interactivity with a human player, while also allowing the game to be played simultaneously by an AI algorithm.
ContributorsBoateng, Andrew Owusu (Author) / Sodemann, Angela (Thesis director) / Martin, Thomas (Committee member) / Software Engineering (Contributor) / Engineering Programs (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
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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
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
Description
Self-Driving cars are a long-lasting ambition for many AI scientists and engineers. In the last decade alone, many self-driving cars like Google Waymo, Tesla Autopilot, Uber, etc. have been roaming the streets of many cities. As a rapidly expanding field, researchers all over the world are attempting to develop more

Self-Driving cars are a long-lasting ambition for many AI scientists and engineers. In the last decade alone, many self-driving cars like Google Waymo, Tesla Autopilot, Uber, etc. have been roaming the streets of many cities. As a rapidly expanding field, researchers all over the world are attempting to develop more safe and efficient AI agents that can navigate through our cities. However, driving is a very complex task to master even for a human, let alone the challenges in developing robots to do the same. It requires attention and inputs from the surroundings of the car, and it is nearly impossible for us to program all the possible factors affecting this complex task. As a solution, imitation learning was introduced, wherein the agents learn a policy, mapping the observations to the actions through demonstrations given by humans. Through imitation learning, one could easily teach self-driving cars the expected behavior in many scenarios. Despite their autonomous nature, it is undeniable that humans play a vital role in the development and execution of safe and trustworthy self-driving cars and hence form the strongest link in this application of Human-Robot Interaction. Several approaches were taken to incorporate this link between humans and self-driving cars, one of which involves the communication of human's navigational instruction to self-driving cars. The communicative channel provides humans with control over the agent’s decisions as well as the ability to guide them in real-time. In this work, the abilities of imitation learning in creating a self-driving agent that can follow natural language instructions given by humans based on environmental objects’ descriptions were explored. The proposed model architecture is capable of handling latent temporal context in these instructions thus making the agent capable of taking multiple decisions along its course. The work shows promising results that push the boundaries of natural language instructions and their complexities in navigating self-driving cars through towns.
ContributorsMoudhgalya, Nithish B (Author) / Amor, Hani Ben (Thesis advisor) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Zhang, Wenlong (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
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Description
Bicycles are already used for daily transportation by a large share of the world's population and provide a partial solution for many issues facing the world today. The low environmental impact of bicycling combined with the reduced requirement for road and parking spaces makes bicycles a good choice for transportation

Bicycles are already used for daily transportation by a large share of the world's population and provide a partial solution for many issues facing the world today. The low environmental impact of bicycling combined with the reduced requirement for road and parking spaces makes bicycles a good choice for transportation over short distances in urban areas. Bicycle riding has also been shown to improve overall health and increase life expectancy. However, riding a bicycle may be inconvenient or impossible for persons with disabilities due to the complex and coordinated nature of the task. Automated bicycles provide an interesting area of study for human-robot interaction, due to the number of contact points between the rider and the bicycle. The goal of the Smart Bike project is to provide a platform for future study of the physical interaction between a semi-autonomous bicycle robot and a human rider, with possible applications in rehabilitation and autonomous vehicle research.

This thesis presents the development of two balance control systems, which utilize actively controlled steering and a control moment gyroscope to stabilize the bicycle at high and low speeds. These systems may also be used to introduce disturbances, which can be useful for studying human reactions. The effectiveness of the steering balance control system is verified through testing with a PID controller in an outdoor environment. Also presented is the development of a force sensitive bicycle seat which provides feedback used to estimate the pose of the rider on the bicycle. The relationship between seat force distribution is demonstrated with a motion capture experiment. A corresponding software system is developed for balance control and sensor integration, with inputs from the rider, the internal balance and steering controller, and a remote operator.
ContributorsBush, Jonathan Ernest (Author) / Zhang, Wenlong (Thesis director) / Sandy, Douglas (Committee member) / Software Engineering (Contributor, Contributor) / Engineering Programs (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05