One of the challenges of task planning is to find out what causes the planning failure and how to handle the failure intelligently. This paper shows how to achieve this. The idea is inspired by the connected graph: each verticle represents a set of compatible \textit{states}, and each edge represents an \textit{action}. For any given initial states and goals, we construct virtual actions to ensure that we always get a plan via task planning. This paper shows how to introduce virtual action to extend action models to make the graph to be connected: i) explicitly defines static predicate (type, permanent properties, etc) or dynamic predicate (state); ii) constructs a full virtual action or a semi-virtual action for each state; iii) finds the cause of the planning failure through a progressive planning approach. The implementation was evaluated in three typical scenarios.
Providing explanations of chosen robotic actions can help to increase the transparency of robotic planning and improve users' trust. Social sciences suggest that the best explanations are contrastive, explaining not just why one action is taken, but why one action is taken instead of another. We formalize the notion of contrastive explanations for robotic planning policies based on Markov decision processes, drawing on insights from the social sciences. We present methods for the automated generation of contrastive explanations with three key factors: selectiveness, constrictiveness, and respo…
We present a Virtual Kinematic Chain (VKC) perspective, a simple yet effective method, to improve task planning efficacy for mobile manipulation. By consolidating the kinematics of the mobile base, the arm, and the object being manipulated collectively as a whole, this novel VKC perspective naturally defines abstract actions and eliminates unnecessary predicates in describing intermediate poses. As a result, these advantages simplify the design of the planning domain and significantly reduce the search space and branching factors in solving planning problems. In experiments, we implement a tas…
Prior studies have found that explaining robot decisions and actions helps to increase system transparency, improve user understanding, and enable effective human-robot collaboration. In this paper, we present a system for generating personalized explanations of robot path planning via user feedback. We consider a robot navigating in an environment modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP), and develop an algorithm to automatically generate a personalized explanation of an optimal MDP policy, based on the user preference regarding four elements (i.e., objective, locality, specificity, and cor…
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Five AI Ltd.（Five AI有限公司）
Inscrutable AI systems are difficult to trust, especially if they operate in safety-critical settings like autonomous driving. Therefore, there is a need to build transparent and queryable systems to increase trust levels. We propose a transparent, human-centric explanation generation method for autonomous vehicle motion planning and prediction based on an existing white-box system called IGP2. Our method integrates Bayesian networks with context-free generative rules and can give causal natural language explanations for the high-level driving behaviour of autonomous vehicles. Preliminary test…
This paper presents an autonomous navigation system for ground robots traversing aggressive unstructured terrain through a cohesive arrangement of mapping, deliberative planning and reactive behaviour modules. All systems are aware of terrain slope, visibility and vehicle orientation, enabling robots to recognize, plan and react around unobserved areas and overcome negative obstacles, slopes, steps, overhangs and narrow passageways. This is one of pioneer works to explicitly and simultaneously couple mapping, planning and reactive components in dealing with negative obstacles. The system was d…
School of Integrated Technology, Yonsei University（延世大学整合技术学院）；Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute（电子通信研究院）
In this study, we applied reinforcement learning based on the proximal policy optimization algorithm to perform motion planning for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in an open space with static obstacles. The application of reinforcement learning through a real UAV has several limitations such as time and cost; thus, we used the Gazebo simulator to train a virtual quadrotor UAV in a virtual environment. As the reinforcement learning progressed, the mean reward and goal rate of the model were increased. Furthermore, the test of the trained model shows that the UAV reaches the goal with an 81% g…
Virtual reality (VR) interfaces for robots provide a three-dimensional (3D) view of the robot in its environment, which allows people to better plan complex robot movements in tight or cluttered spaces. In our prior work, we created a VR interface to allow for the teleoperation of a humanoid robot. As detailed in this paper, we have now focused on a human-in-the-loop planner where the operator can send higher level manipulation and navigation goals in VR through functional waypoints, visualize the results of a robot planner in the 3D virtual space, and then deny, alter or confirm the plan to s…
As the capability and complexity of UAVs continue to increase, the human-robot interface community has a responsibility to design better ways of specifying the complex 3D flight paths necessary for instructing them. Immersive interfaces, such as those afforded by virtual reality (VR), have several unique traits which may improve the user's ability to perceive and specify 3D information. These traits include stereoscopic depth cues which induce a sense of physical space as well as six degrees of freedom (DoF) natural head-pose and gesture interactions. This work introduces an open-source platfo…
Robots assisting humans in complex domains have to represent knowledge and reason at both the sensorimotor level and the social level. The architecture described in this paper couples the non-monotonic logical reasoning capabilities of a declarative language with probabilistic belief revision, enabling robots to represent and reason with qualitative and quantitative descriptions of knowledge and degrees of belief. Specifically, incomplete domain knowledge, including information that holds in all but a few exceptional situations, is represented as a Answer Set Prolog (ASP) program. The answer s…
Quadruped platforms have become an active topic of research due to their high mobility and traversability in rough terrain. However, it is highly challenging to determine whether the clattered environment could be passed by the robot and how exactly its path should be calculated. Moreover, the calculated path may pass through areas with dynamic objects or environments that are dangerous for the robot or people around. Therefore, we propose a novel conceptual approach of teaching quadruped robots navigation through user-guided path planning in virtual reality (VR). Our system contains both glob…
Automatic welding of tubular TKY joints is an important and challenging task for the marine and offshore industry. In this paper, a framework for tubular joint detection and motion planning is proposed. The pose of the real tubular joint is detected using RGB-D sensors, which is used to obtain a real-to-virtual mapping for positioning the workpiece in a virtual environment. For motion planning, a Bi-directional Transition based Rapidly exploring Random Tree (BiTRRT) algorithm is used to generate trajectories for reaching the desired goals. The complete framework is verified with experiments, a…
Shandong University（山东大学）；Shandong Youbaote Intelligent Robot Co., Ltd（山东优宝特智能机器人有限公司）；China North Vehicle Research Institute（中国北方车辆研究所）
An intuitive control method for the flying trot, which combines offline trajectory planning with real-time balance control, is presented. The motion features of running animals in the vertical direction were analysed using the spring-load-inverted-pendulum (SLIP) model, and the foot trajectory of the robot was planned, so the robot could run similar to an animal capable of vertical flight, according to the given height and speed of the trunk. To improve the robustness of running, a posture control method based on a foot acceleration adjustment is proposed. A novel kinematic based CoM observati…
University of Colorado Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）；Technion（以色列理工学院）
Traditional multi-robot motion planning (MMP) focuses on computing trajectories for multiple robots acting in an environment, such that the robots do not collide when the trajectories are taken simultaneously. In safety-critical applications, a human supervisor may want to verify that the plan is indeed collision-free. In this work, we propose a notion of explanation for a plan of MMP, based on visualization of the plan as a short sequence of images representing time segments, where in each time segment the trajectories of the agents are disjoint, clearly illustrating the safety of the plan. W…
Agri-Sim: Agricultural Simulation Platform for Embodied Intelligence Evaluation in Greenhouse Robotics
School of Mechatronic Engineering and Automation, Shanghai University（上海大学机电工程与自动化学院）；Sino-European School of Technology of Shanghai University（上海大学中欧工程技术学院）；School of Future Technology (Institute of Artificial Intelligence), Shanghai University（上海大学未来技术学院（人工智能研究院））
Autonomy and connectivity are considered among the most promising technologies to improve safety, mobility, fuel and time consumption in transportation systems. Some of the fuel efficiency benefits of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) can be realized through platooning. A platoon is a virtual train of CAVs that travel together following the platoon head, with small gaps between them. Vehicles may also reduce travel time by lane changing. In this paper, we devise an optimal control-based trajectory planning model that can provide safe and efficient trajectories for the subject vehicle and…
VERM: Leveraging Foundation Models to Create a Virtual Eye for Efficient 3D Robotic Manipulation
New Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (NLPR), State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems (MAIS), Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别新技术实验室，多模态人工智能系统国家重点实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；FiveAges；Shandong University（山东大学）
