We present an integrated system in which an operator uses a simulated environment to program part-mating and contact tasks. Generation of models within this virtual environment is facilitated using a fast, occlusion-tolerant, 3D grey-scale vision system which can recognize and accurately locate objects within the work site. A major goal of this work is to make robotic programming easy and intui...

We present a new visual programming language and environment that serves as a form of feedback and representation in a Programming by Demonstration system The language di ers from existing visual languages because it explicitly represents data objects and implicitly represents operations by changes in data objects The system was designed to provide non programmers with programming support for c...

enable ordinary end users to create programs without needing to learn the arcane details of programming languages, but simply by demonstrating what their program should do. If PBD were successful, the vast population of nonprogrammer computer users would be able to take control of their computing experience and create programs to automate routine tasks, develop applications for their specific n...

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...

We present a novel approach to learning predictive sequential models, called similarity-based alignment and generalization, which incorporates in the induction process a specific form of domain knowledge derived from a similarity metric of the points in the input space. When applied to Hidden Markov Models, our framework yields a new class of learning algorithms called SimAlignGen. We discuss t...

We have extended behavior trees to support a form of casebased reasoning by retrieving the best action to be performed according to the current state of the game. The case based was filled by programming by demonstration techniques. In this paper we demonstrate how this extension can be used to program the behavior of a non-player character in a complex 3D video game. We have also measured the ...

The paper uses mesoscopic, non-linear lattice dynamics based (Peyrard-Bishop-Dauxois, PBD) modeling to describe thermal properties of DNA below and near the denaturation temperature. Computationally efficient notation is introduced for the relevant statistical mechanics. Computed melting profiles of long and short heterogeneous sequences are presented, using a recently introduced reparametrizat...

We present a new visual programming language and environment that serves as a form of feedback and representation in a Programming by Demonstration system. The language differs from existing visual languages because it explicitly represents data objects and implicitly represents operations by changes in data objects. The system was designed to provide non-programmers with programming support fo...

The decision-making by agents in games is commonly based on reinforcement learning. To improve the quality of agents, it is necessary to solve the problems of the time and state space that are required for learning. Such problems can be solved by Macro-Actions, which are defined and executed by a sequence of primitive actions. In this line of research, the learning time is reduced by cutting do...