AUTOMATION 21XX

Company Profile

The Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics experiments with computational principles underlying flexible, adaptable systems. We are concerned with robot systems that must produce many kinds of behavior in nonstationary environments. This implies that the objective of behavior is constantly changing as, for instance, when battery levels change, or when nondeterminism in the environment causes dangerous situations (or opportunities) to occur. We refer to these kinds of problem domains as open systems - they are only partially observable and partially controllable. To estimate hidden state and to expand the set of achievable control transitions, we have implemented temporally extended observations and actions, respectively. The kinds of world models developed in such systems are the product of native structure, rewards, environmental stimuli, and experience. We also consider redundant robot systems - i.e. those that have many ways of perceiving important events and many ways of manipulating the world to effect change. We employ distributed solutions to multi-objective problems and propose that hierarchical robot programs should be acquired incrementally in a manner inspired by sensorimotor development in human infants. We propose to grow a functioning machine agency by observing that robot systems possess a great deal of intrinsic structure (kinematic, dynamic, perceptual, motor) that we discover and exploit during on-going interaction with the world. Finally, we study robot systems that collaborate with humans and with other robots. A mixed-initiative system can take actions derived from competing internal objectives as well as from external peers and supervisors. Part of our goal concerns how such a robot system can explain why it is behaving in a particular way and can communicate effectively with others.

Product Range

• AI research: Autonomous navigation
• AI research: Cognitive robotics
• AI research: Robot society
• Mobile robot research: Dual-wheeled mobile robots
• Mobile robot research: Field and service robots
• Mobile robot research: Legged machines
• Mobile robot research: Navigation systems
• Mobile robot research: Robot societies
• Mobile robot research: Robotics mobility platforms
• Mobile robot research: Service robot
• Mobile robot research: Walking robot
• Robotics research: 3-D Grasping simulation
• Robotics research: Autonomous robots
• Robotics research: Autonomous walking-robot
• Robotics research: Biped robot
• Robotics research: Grippers, multiple degree-of-freedom
• Robotics research: Human pose and action recognition
• Robotics research: Human robot interaction
• Robotics research: Human-machine interaction
• Robotics research: Humanoid robot technology
• Robotics research: Indoor mobile robots
• Robotics research: Learning from demonstration
• Robotics research: Mobile robotics
• Robotics research: Visual interface for human-robot interaction