No Arabic abstract
Many tasks, particularly those involving interaction with the environment, are characterized by high variability, making robotic autonomy difficult. One flexible solution is to introduce the input of a human with superior experience and cognitive abilities as part of a shared autonomy policy. However, current methods for shared autonomy are not designed to address the wide range of necessary corrections (e.g., positions, forces, execution rate, etc.) that the user may need to provide to address task variability. In this paper, we present corrective shared autonomy, where users provide corrections to key robot state variables on top of an otherwise autonomous task model. We provide an instantiation of this shared autonomy paradigm and demonstrate its viability and benefits such as low user effort and physical demand via a system-level user study on three tasks involving variability situated in aircraft manufacturing.
Corrective Shared Autonomy is a method where human corrections are layered on top of an otherwise autonomous robot behavior. Specifically, a Corrective Shared Autonomy system leverages an external controller to allow corrections across a range of task variables (e.g., spinning speed of a tool, applied force, path) to address the specific needs of a task. However, this inherent flexibility makes the choice of what corrections to allow at any given instant difficult to determine. This choice of corrections includes determining appropriate robot state variables, scaling for these variables, and a way to allow a user to specify the corrections in an intuitive manner. This paper enables efficient Corrective Shared Autonomy by providing an automated solution based on Learning from Demonstration to both extract the nominal behavior and address these core problems. Our evaluation shows that this solution enables users to successfully complete a surface cleaning task, identifies different strategies users employed in applying corrections, and points to future improvements for our solution.
Shared autonomy enables robots to infer user intent and assist in accomplishing it. But when the user wants to do a new task that the robot does not know about, shared autonomy will hinder their performance by attempting to assist them with something that is not their intent. Our key idea is that the robot can detect when its repertoire of intents is insufficient to explain the users input, and give them back control. This then enables the robot to observe unhindered task execution, learn the new intent behind it, and add it to this repertoire. We demonstrate with both a case study and a user study that our proposed method maintains good performance when the humans intent is in the robots repertoire, outperforms prior shared autonomy approaches when it isnt, and successfully learns new skills, enabling efficient lifelong learning for confidence-based shared autonomy.
Despite the fact that robotic platforms can provide both consistent practice and objective assessments of users over the course of their training, there are relatively few instances where physical human robot interaction has been significantly more effective than unassisted practice or human-mediated training. This paper describes a hybrid shared control robot, which enhances task learning through kinesthetic feedback. The assistance assesses user actions using a task-specific evaluation criterion and selectively accepts or rejects them at each time instant. Through two human subject studies (total n=68), we show that this hybrid approach of switching between full transparency and full rejection of user inputs leads to increased skill acquisition and short-term retention compared to unassisted practice. Moreover, we show that the shared control paradigm exhibits features previously shown to promote successful training. It avoids user passivity by only rejecting user actions and allowing failure at the task. It improves performance during assistance, providing meaningful task-specific feedback. It is sensitive to initial skill of the user and behaves as an `assist-as-needed control scheme---adapting its engagement in real time based on the performance and needs of the user. Unlike other successful algorithms, it does not require explicit modulation of the level of impedance or error amplification during training and it is permissive to a range of strategies because of its evaluation criterion. We demonstrate that the proposed hybrid shared control paradigm with a task-based minimal intervention criterion significantly enhances task-specific training.
Shared control in teleoperation for providing robot assistance to accomplish object manipulation, called telemanipulation, is a new promising yet challenging problem. This has unique challenges--on top of teleoperation challenges in general--due to difficulties of physical discrepancy between human hands and robot hands as well as the fine motion constraints to constitute task success. We present an intuitive shared-control strategy where the focus is on generating robotic grasp poses which are better suited for human perception of successful teleoperated object manipulation and feeling of being in control of the robot, rather than developing objective stable grasp configurations for task success or following the human motion. The former is achieved by understanding human intent and autonomously taking over control on that inference. The latter is achieved by considering human inputs as hard motion constraints which the robot must abide. An arbitration of these two enables a trade-off for the subsequent robot motion to balance accomplishing the inferred task and motion constraints imposed by the operator. The arbitration framework adapts to the level of physical discrepancy between the human and different robot structures, enabling the assistance to indicate and appear to intuitively follow the user. To understand how users perceive good arbitration in object telemanipulation, we have conducted a user study with a hands-free telemanipulation setup to analyze the effect of factors including task predictability, perceived following, and user preference. The hands-free telemanipulation scene is chosen as the validation platform due to its more urgent need of intuitive robotics assistance for task success.
A key challenge in Imitation Learning (IL) is that optimal state actions demonstrations are difficult for the teacher to provide. For example in robotics, providing kinesthetic demonstrations on a robotic manipulator requires the teacher to control multiple degrees of freedom at once. The difficulty of requiring optimal state action demonstrations limits the space of problems where the teacher can provide quality feedback. As an alternative to state action demonstrations, the teacher can provide corrective feedback such as their preferences or rewards. Prior work has created algorithms designed to learn from specific types of noisy feedback, but across teachers and tasks different forms of feedback may be required. Instead we propose that in order to learn from a diversity of scenarios we need to learn from a variety of feedback. To learn from a variety of feedback we make the following insight: the teachers cost function is latent and we can model a stream of feedback as a stream of loss functions. We then use any online learning algorithm to minimize the sum of these losses. With this insight we can learn from a diversity of feedback that is weakly correlated with the teachers true cost function. We unify prior work into a general corrective feedback meta-algorithm and show that regardless of feedback we can obtain the same regret bounds. We demonstrate our approach by learning to perform a household navigation task on a robotic racecar platform. Our results show that our approach can learn quickly from a variety of noisy feedback.