ShelfHelp: Empowering Humans to Perform Vision-Independent Manipulation Tasks with a Socially Assistive Robotic Cane

The ability to shop independently, especially in grocery stores, is important for maintaining a high quality of life. This can be particularly challenging for people with visual impairments (PVI). Stores carry thousands of products, with approximately 30,000 new products introduced each year in the US market alone, presenting a challenge even for modern computer vision solutions. Through this work, we present a proof-of-concept socially assistive robotic system we call ShelfHelp, and propose novel technical solutions for enhancing instrumented canes traditionally meant for navigation tasks with additional capability within the domain of shopping. ShelfHelp includes a novel visual product locator algorithm designed for use in grocery stores and a novel planner that autonomously issues verbal manipulation guidance commands to guide the user during product retrieval. Through a human subjects study, we show the system's success in locating and providing effective manipulation guidance to retrieve desired products with novice users. We compare two autonomous verbal guidance modes achieving comparable performance to a human assistance baseline and present encouraging findings that validate our system's efficiency and effectiveness and through positive subjective metrics including competence, intelligence, and ease of use.

Large Language Models Enable Automated Formative Feedback in Human-Robot Interaction Tasks

We claim that LLMs can be paired with formal analysis methods to provide accessible, relevant feedback for HRI tasks. While logic specifications are useful for defining and assessing a task, these representations are not easily interpreted by non-experts. Luckily, LLMs are adept at generating easy-to-understand text that explains difficult concepts. By integrating task assessment outcomes and other contextual information into an LLM prompt, we can effectively synthesize a useful set of recommendations for the learner to improve their performance.

Automated Assessment and Adaptive Multimodal Formative Feedback Improves Psychomotor Skills Training Outcomes in Quadrotor Teleoperation

The workforce will need to continually upskill in order to meet the evolving demands of industry, especially working with robotic and autonomous systems. Current training methods are not scalable and do not adapt to the skills that learners already possess. In this work, we develop a system that automatically assesses learner skill in a quadrotor teleoperation task using temporal logic task specifications. This assessment is used to generate multimodal feedback based on the principles of effective formative feedback. Participants perceived the feedback positively. Those receiving formative feedback viewed the feedback as more actionable compared to receiving summary statistics. Participants in the multimodal feedback condition were more likely to achieve a safe landing and increased their safe landings more over the experiment compared to other feedback conditions. Finally, we identify themes to improve adaptive feedback and discuss and how training for complex psychomotor tasks can be integrated with learning theories.

SceneSense: Diffusion Models for 3D Occupancy Synthesis from Partial Observation

When exploring new areas, robotic systems generally exclusively plan and execute controls over geometry that has been directly measured. When entering space that was previously obstructed from view such as turning corners in hallways or entering new rooms, robots often pause to plan over the newly observed space. To address this we present SceneScene, a real-time 3D diffusion model for synthesizing 3D occupancy information from partial observations that effectively predicts these occluded or out of view geometries for use in future planning and control frameworks. SceneSense uses a running occupancy map and a single RGB-D camera to generate predicted geometry around the platform at runtime, even when the geometry is occluded or out of view. Our architecture ensures that SceneSense never overwrites observed free or occupied space. By preserving the integrity of the observed map, SceneSense mitigates the risk of corrupting the observed space with generative predictions. While SceneSense is shown to operate well using a single RGB-D camera, the framework is flexible enough to extend to additional modalities. SceneSense operates as part of any system that generates a running occupancy map `out of the box', removing conditioning from the framework. Alternatively, for maximum performance in new modalities, the perception backbone can be replaced and the model retrained for inference in new applications. Unlike existing models that necessitate multiple views and offline scene synthesis, or are focused on filling gaps in observed data, our findings demonstrate that SceneSense is an effective approach to estimating unobserved local occupancy information at runtime. Local occupancy predictions from SceneSense are shown to better represent the ground truth occupancy distribution during the test exploration trajectories than the running occupancy map.

Workspace Optimization Techniques to Improve Prediction of Human Motion During Human-Robot Collaboration

Understanding human intentions is critical for safe and effective human-robot collaboration. While state of the art methods for human goal prediction utilize learned models to account for the uncertainty of human motion data, that data is inherently stochastic and high variance, hindering those models' utility for interactions requiring coordination, including safety-critical or close-proximity tasks. Our key insight is that robot teammates can deliberately configure shared workspaces prior to interaction in order to reduce the variance in human motion, realizing classifier-agnostic improvements in goal prediction. In this work, we present an algorithmic approach for a robot to arrange physical objects and project "virtual obstacles" using augmented reality in shared human-robot workspaces, optimizing for human legibility over a given set of tasks. We compare our approach against other workspace arrangement strategies using two human-subjects studies, one in a virtual 2D navigation domain and the other in a live tabletop manipulation domain involving a robotic manipulator arm. We evaluate the accuracy of human motion prediction models learned from each condition, demonstrating that our workspace optimization technique with virtual obstacles leads to higher robot prediction accuracy using less training data.

Improving Human Legibility in Collaborative Robot Tasks through Augmented Reality and Workspace Preparation

Understanding the intentions of human teammates is critical for safe and effective human-robot interaction. The canonical approach for human-aware robot motion planning is to first predict the human's goal or path, and then construct a robot plan that avoids collision with the human. This method can generate unsafe interactions if the human model and subsequent predictions are inaccurate. In this work, we present an algorithmic approach for both arranging the configuration of objects in a shared human-robot workspace, and projecting ``virtual obstacles'' in augmented reality, optimizing for legibility in a given task. These changes to the workspace result in more legible human behavior, improving robot predictions of human goals, thereby improving task fluency and safety. To evaluate our approach, we propose two user studies involving a collaborative tabletop task with a manipulator robot, and a warehouse navigation task with a mobile robot.

Towards A Natural Language Interface for Flexible Multi-Agent Task Assignment

Task assignment and scheduling algorithms are powerful tools for autonomously coordinating large teams of robotic or AI agents. However, the decisions these system make often rely on components designed by domain experts, which can be difficult for non-technical end-users to understand or modify to their own ends. In this paper we propose a preliminary design for a flexible natural language interface for a task assignment system. The goal of our approach is both to grant users more control over a task assignment system's decision process, as well as render these decisions more transparent. Users can direct the task assignment system via natural language commands, which are applied as constraints to a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) using a large language model (LLM). Additionally, our proposed system can alert users to potential issues with their commands, and engage them in a corrective dialogue in order to find a viable solution. We conclude with a description of our planned user-evaluation in the simulated environment Overcooked and describe next steps towards developing a flexible and transparent task allocation system.

Bilevel Optimization for Just-in-Time Robotic Kitting and Delivery via Adaptive Task Segmentation and Scheduling

Kitting refers to the task of preparing and grouping necessary parts and tools (or "kits") for assembly in a manufacturing environment. Automating this process simplifies the assembly task for human workers and improves efficiency. Existing automated kitting systems adhere to scripted instructions and predefined heuristics. However, given variability in the availability of parts and logistic delays, the inflexibility of existing systems can limit the overall efficiency of an assembly line. In this paper, we propose a bilevel optimization framework to enable a robot to perform task segmentation-based part selection, kit arrangement, and delivery scheduling to provide custom-tailored kits just in time - i.e., right when they are needed. We evaluate the proposed approach both through a human subjects study (n=18) involving the construction of a flat-pack furniture table and shop-flow simulation based on the data from the study. Our results show that the just-in-time kitting system is objectively more efficient, resilient to upstream shop flow delays, and subjectively more preferable as compared to baseline approaches of using kits defined by rigid task segmentation boundaries defined by the task graph itself or a single kit that includes all parts necessary to assemble a single unit.

Intention-Aware Navigation in Crowds with Extended-Space POMDP Planning

This paper presents a hybrid online Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) planning system that addresses the problem of autonomous navigation in the presence of multi-modal uncertainty introduced by other agents in the environment. As a particular example, we consider the problem of autonomous navigation in dense crowds of pedestrians and among obstacles. Popular approaches to this problem first generate a path using a complete planner (e.g., Hybrid A*) with ad-hoc assumptions about uncertainty, then use online tree-based POMDP solvers to reason about uncertainty with control over a limited aspect of the problem (i.e. speed along the path). We present a more capable and responsive real-time approach enabling the POMDP planner to control more degrees of freedom (e.g., both speed AND heading) to achieve more flexible and efficient solutions. This modification greatly extends the region of the state space that the POMDP planner must reason over, significantly increasing the importance of finding effective roll-out policies within the limited computational budget that real time control affords. Our key insight is to use multi-query motion planning techniques (e.g., Probabilistic Roadmaps or Fast Marching Method) as priors for rapidly generating efficient roll-out policies for every state that the POMDP planning tree might reach during its limited horizon search. Our proposed approach generates trajectories that are safe and significantly more efficient than the previous approach, even in densely crowded dynamic environments with long planning horizons.

PokeRRT: A Kinodynamic Planning Approach for Poking Manipulation

This work introduces PokeRRT, a novel motion planning algorithm that demonstrates poking as an effective non-prehensile manipulation skill to enable fast manipulation of objects and increase the size of a robot's reachable workspace. Our qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the advantages of poking over pushing and grasping in planning object trajectories through uncluttered and cluttered environments.