A great challenge for robotic systems is their ability to carry on complex manipulation and locomotion tasks while responding to the changing environment. To allow robots to operate in human environments there is a strong need to develop new control architectures that can provide advanced task capabilities and interactive skills. These architectures must be effective in coordinating whole-body ...

A credible theory of intelligence must provide a satisfactory account of the wide spectrum of learning abilities displayed by humans and some other animals. One of the most impressive of these is skill acquisition—the ability to create new skills, refine them through practice, and apply them in new task contexts. This ability to retain and refine solutions to important subproblems and then empl...

The simultaneous consideration of various notions (practice, procedure, prescribed task, effective task, task space, task search, task, method, activity) shows that the task accomplishment cannot be discussed at a general level, as classical approaches do. Rather, this paper points out the importance to distinguish the task definition and the task realization because the former is mainly static...

GETTING OLD AT THE TOP: THE ROLE OF AFFECTIVE ABILITIES ANDLEADERSHIP ROLE CHARACTERISTICS IN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN AGEAND LEADERSHIP BEHAVIORSbyGREGORY R. THRASHERMay 2017Advisor: Dr. Marcus W. DicksonMajor: Psychology (IndustrialOrganizational)Degree: Doctor of PhilosophyLeadership behaviors and the outcomes they foster have historically been a centr...

Volitional behaviors can be construed as “work” (extrinsically motivated) or as “fun” (intrinsically motivated). When volitional behaviors are construed as an obligation to work, completing the behavior depletes a consumer, and subsequent self-control becomes more difficult. When volitional behaviors are construed as an opportunity to have fun, completing the behavior vitalizes a consumer, and ...

The notion of a compensation is widely used in advanced transaction models as means of recovery from a failure. Similar concepts are adopted for providing “transaction-like” behavior for long business processes supported by workflows technology. Generally, designing a compensating task in the context of a workflow process is a non-trivial job. In fact, not every task is compensatable. This work...

Adolescence is a period of rapid physical growth, correlated with increased exploration and novelty-seeking behaviors that can be potentially risky. These behaviors can be mediated by processes such as environmental enrichment (EE), which consists of repeated exposure to novelty and physical exercise beyond that available in standard lab housing. Prior research indicates EE has a significant mi...

We propose an approach to the synthesis of hierarchical control systems comprising both evolved and manually programmed control for autonomous robots. We recursively divide the goal task into subtasks until a solution can be evolved or until a solution can easily be programmed by hand. Hierarchical composition of behavior allows us to overcome the fundamental challenges that typically prevent e...

This paper presents an attempt on incremental robot learning from demonstration. Based on previously learnt knowledge about a task in simpler situations, a robot learns to fulfill the same task properly in a more complicated situation through analyzing comparative demonstrations and extracting new knowledge, especially the constraints that the task in the new situation imposes on the robot’s be...