Robots are rapidly becoming part of our lives, coexisting, interacting, and collaborating with humans in dynamic and unstructured environments. Mapping of human to robot motion has become increasingly important, as human demonstrations are employed in order to “teach” robots how to execute tasks both efficiently and anthropomorphically. Previous mapping approaches utilized complex analytical or...

Reinforcement learning is a promising approach to developing hard-to-engineer adaptive solutions for complex and diverse robotic tasks. However, learning with real-world robots is often unreliable and difficult, which resulted in their low adoption in reinforcement learning research. This difficulty is worsened by the lack of guidelines for setting up learning tasks with robots. In this work, w...

Human arm is one of the most sophisticated biological limbs known in a wildlife, capable to accomplish the most different and delicate sensory-motor tasks such as for example, lifting and carrying of payload, precise manipulation, symbolic gesticulation up to a fine sensitivity and tactile perception, pressure feeling, texture, temperature, moisture, fluid stream sensing, etc. A human arm with ...

After a brief review of the current research on multi-robot systems, the paper presents a path planning and control scheme for a cooperative three-robot system transferring/manipulating a large object from an initial to a desired final position/orientation. The robots are assumed to be capable of holding the object at three points that define an isosceles triangle. The mode of operation adopted...

One of the biggest obstacles facing humans and robots is the lack of means for natural and meaningful interaction. Robots find it difficult to understand human intentions since our way of communication is different from the way machines exchange their information. Our aim is to remove this barrier by creating systems that react and respond to natural human actions. In this research, we present ...

To develop human friendly robots we required two key components ; smart interfaces and safe mechanisms. Smart interfaces facilitate natural and easy interfaces for human-robot interaction. Facial gestures can be a natural way to control a robot. In this paper, we report on a vision-based interface that in real-time tracks a user's facial features and gaze point. Human friendly robots must also ...

The rise of military drones and other robots deployed in ethically-sensitive contexts has fueled interest in developing autonomous agents that behave ethically. The ability for autonomous agents to independently reason about situational ethics will inevitably lead to confrontations between robots and human operators regarding the morality of issued commands. Ideally, a robot would be able to su...

In this paper we present two controllers for robots that combine terms for the compensation of gravity forces, and the forces of friction of motors and gearboxes. The Low-Friction Zero-Gravity controller allows a guidance of the robot without effort, allowing small friction forces to reduce the free robot motion. It can serve to aid users providing kinesthetic demonstrations while programming b...

Robots provide us with a means to move around in, visualize, and interact with a remote physical world. We have exploited these physical properties coupled with the growing diversity of users on the World Wide Web (WWW) [1] to create a WWW based telerobotic remote environment browser. This browser, called Mechanical Gaze, allows multiple remote WWW users to control a robot arm with an attached ...