Industrial robots are applied in a widening range of industries, but robot programming mostly remains a task limited to programming experts. We propose a natural language-based assistant for programming of advanced, industrial robotic applications and investigate strategies for domain-specific fine-tuning of foundation models with limited data and compute.
Human-robot collaboration, in which the robot intelligently assists the human with the upcoming task, is an appealing objective. To achieve this goal, the agent needs to be equipped with a fundamental collaborative navigation ability, where the agent should reason human intention by observing human activities and then navigate to the human's intended destination in advance of the human. However, this vital ability has not been well studied in previous literature. To fill this gap, we propose a collaborative navigation (CoNav) benchmark. Our CoNav tackles the critical challenge of constructing a 3D navigation environment with realistic and diverse human activities. To achieve this, we design a novel LLM-based humanoid animation generation framework, which is conditioned on both text descriptions and environmental context. The generated humanoid trajectory obeys the environmental context and can be easily integrated into popular simulators. We empirically find that the existing navigation methods struggle in CoNav task since they neglect the perception of human intention. To solve this problem, we propose an intention-aware agent for reasoning both long-term and short-term human intention. The agent predicts navigation action based on the predicted intention and panoramic observation. The emergent agent behavior including observing humans, avoiding human collision, and navigation reveals the efficiency of the proposed datasets and agents.
Symbolic task planning is a widely used approach to enforce robot autonomy due to its ease of understanding and deployment in robot architectures. However, techniques for symbolic task planning are difficult to scale in real-world, human-robot collaboration scenarios because of the poor performance in complex planning domains or when frequent re-planning is needed. We present a framework, Teriyaki, specifically aimed at bridging the gap between symbolic task planning and machine learning approaches. The rationale is training Large Language Models (LLMs), namely GPT-3, into a neurosymbolic task planner compatible with the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL), and then leveraging its generative capabilities to overcome a number of limitations inherent to symbolic task planners. Potential benefits include (i) a better scalability in so far as the planning domain complexity increases, since LLMs' response time linearly scales with the combined length of the input and the output, and (ii) the ability to synthesize a plan action-by-action instead of end-to-end, making each action available for execution as soon as it is generated instead of waiting for the whole plan to be available, which in turn enables concurrent planning and execution. Recently, significant efforts have been devoted by the research community to evaluate the cognitive capabilities of LLMs, with alternate successes. Instead, with Teriyaki we aim to provide an overall planning performance comparable to traditional planners in specific planning domains, while leveraging LLMs capabilities to build a look-ahead predictive planning model. Preliminary results in selected domains show that our method can: (i) solve 95.5% of problems in a test data set of 1,000 samples; (ii) produce plans up to 13.5% shorter than a traditional symbolic planner; (iii) reduce average overall waiting times for a plan availability by up to 61.4%
Much work has been done to develop causal reasoning techniques across a number of domains, however the utilisation of causality within autonomous systems is still in its infancy. Autonomous systems would greatly benefit from the integration of causality through the use of representations such as structural causal models (SCMs). The system would be afforded a higher level of transparency, it would enable post-hoc explanations of outcomes, and assist in the online inference of exogenous variables. These qualities are either directly beneficial to the autonomous system or a valuable step in building public trust and informing regulation. To such an end we present a case study in which we describe a module-based autonomous driving system comprised of SCMs. Approaching this task requires considerations of a number of challenges when dealing with a system of great complexity and size, that must operate for extended periods of time by itself. Here we describe these challenges, and present solutions. The first of these is SCM contexts, with the remainder being three new variable categories -- two of which are based upon functional programming monads. Finally, we conclude by presenting an example application of the causal capabilities of the autonomous driving system. In this example, we aim to attribute culpability between vehicular agents in a hypothetical road collision incident.
In collaborative human-robot manipulation, a robot must predict human intents and adapt its actions accordingly to smoothly execute tasks. However, the human's intent in turn depends on actions the robot takes, creating a chicken-or-egg problem. Prior methods ignore such inter-dependency and instead train marginal intent prediction models independent of robot actions. This is because training conditional models is hard given a lack of paired human-robot interaction datasets. Can we instead leverage large-scale human-human interaction data that is more easily accessible? Our key insight is to exploit a correspondence between human and robot actions that enables transfer learning from human-human to human-robot data. We propose a novel architecture, InteRACT, that pre-trains a conditional intent prediction model on large human-human datasets and fine-tunes on a small human-robot dataset. We evaluate on a set of real-world collaborative human-robot manipulation tasks and show that our conditional model improves over various marginal baselines. We also introduce new techniques to tele-operate a 7-DoF robot arm and collect a diverse range of human-robot collaborative manipulation data, which we open-source.
Traditional approaches to human-robot interaction design typically examine robot behaviors in controlled environments and narrow tasks. These methods are impractical for designing robots that interact with diverse user groups in complex human environments. Drawing from the field of theater, we present the construct of scenes -- individual environments consisting of specific people, objects, spatial arrangements, and social norms -- and tangible scenography, as a holistic design approach for human-robot interactions. We created a design tool, Tangible Scenography Kit (TaSK), with physical props to aid in design brainstorming. We conducted design sessions with eight professional designers to generate exploratory designs. Designers used tangible scenography and TaSK components to create multiple scenes with specific interaction goals, characterize each scene's social environment, and design scene-specific robot behaviors. From these sessions, we found that this method can encourage designers to think beyond a robot's narrow capabilities and consider how they can facilitate complex social interactions.
In modern machine learning, models can often fit training data in numerous ways, some of which perform well on unseen (test) data, while others do not. Remarkably, in such cases gradient descent frequently exhibits an implicit bias that leads to excellent performance on unseen data. This implicit bias was extensively studied in supervised learning, but is far less understood in optimal control (reinforcement learning). There, learning a controller applied to a system via gradient descent is known as policy gradient, and a question of prime importance is the extent to which a learned controller extrapolates to unseen initial states. This paper theoretically studies the implicit bias of policy gradient in terms of extrapolation to unseen initial states. Focusing on the fundamental Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) problem, we establish that the extent of extrapolation depends on the degree of exploration induced by the system when commencing from initial states included in training. Experiments corroborate our theory, and demonstrate its conclusions on problems beyond LQR, where systems are non-linear and controllers are neural networks. We hypothesize that real-world optimal control may be greatly improved by developing methods for informed selection of initial states to train on.
Deep learning offers promising new ways to accurately model aleatoric uncertainty in robotic estimation systems, particularly when the uncertainty distributions do not conform to traditional assumptions of being fixed and Gaussian. In this study, we formulate and evaluate three fundamental deep learning approaches for conditional probability density modeling to quantify non-Gaussian aleatoric uncertainty: parametric, discretized, and generative modeling. We systematically compare the respective strengths and weaknesses of these three methods on simulated non-Gaussian densities as well as on real-world terrain-relative navigation data. Our results show that these deep learning methods can accurately capture complex uncertainty patterns, highlighting their potential for improving the reliability and robustness of estimation systems.
Reinforcement learning is able to obtain generalized low-level robot policies on diverse robotics datasets in embodied learning scenarios, and Transformer has been widely used to model time-varying features. However, it still suffers from the issues of low data efficiency and high inference latency. In this paper, we propose to investigate the task from a new perspective of the frequency domain. We first observe that the energy density in the frequency domain of a robot's trajectory is mainly concentrated in the low-frequency part. Then, we present the Fourier Controller Network (FCNet), a new network that utilizes the Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) to extract and encode time-varying features through frequency domain interpolation. We further achieve parallel training and efficient recurrent inference by using FFT and Sliding DFT methods in the model architecture for real-time decision-making. Comprehensive analyses in both simulated (e.g., D4RL) and real-world environments (e.g., robot locomotion) demonstrate FCNet's substantial efficiency and effectiveness over existing methods such as Transformer, e.g., FCNet outperforms Transformer on multi-environmental robotics datasets of all types of sizes (from 1.9M to 120M). The project page and code can be found //thkkk.github.io/fcnet.
The development of autonomous agents which can interact with other agents to accomplish a given task is a core area of research in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Towards this goal, the Autonomous Agents Research Group develops novel machine learning algorithms for autonomous systems control, with a specific focus on deep reinforcement learning and multi-agent reinforcement learning. Research problems include scalable learning of coordinated agent policies and inter-agent communication; reasoning about the behaviours, goals, and composition of other agents from limited observations; and sample-efficient learning based on intrinsic motivation, curriculum learning, causal inference, and representation learning. This article provides a broad overview of the ongoing research portfolio of the group and discusses open problems for future directions.
Autonomic computing investigates how systems can achieve (user) specified control outcomes on their own, without the intervention of a human operator. Autonomic computing fundamentals have been substantially influenced by those of control theory for closed and open-loop systems. In practice, complex systems may exhibit a number of concurrent and inter-dependent control loops. Despite research into autonomic models for managing computer resources, ranging from individual resources (e.g., web servers) to a resource ensemble (e.g., multiple resources within a data center), research into integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to improve resource autonomy and performance at scale continues to be a fundamental challenge. The integration of AI/ML to achieve such autonomic and self-management of systems can be achieved at different levels of granularity, from full to human-in-the-loop automation. In this article, leading academics, researchers, practitioners, engineers, and scientists in the fields of cloud computing, AI/ML, and quantum computing join to discuss current research and potential future directions for these fields. Further, we discuss challenges and opportunities for leveraging AI and ML in next generation computing for emerging computing paradigms, including cloud, fog, edge, serverless and quantum computing environments.