Service dogs have successfully provided assistance to thousands of motor-impaired people worldwide. As a step towards the creation of robots that provide comparable assistance, we present a biologically inspired robot ...

Objects within human environments are usually found on flat surfaces that are orthogonal to gravity, such as floors, tables, and shelves. We first present a new assistive robot that is explicitly designed to take advantage ...

For many promising application areas, autonomous mobile manipulators do not yet exhibit sufficiently robust performance. We propose the use of tags applied to task-relevant locations in human environments in order to help ...

We present an active learning approach that enables a mobile manipulator to autonomously learn task-relevant features. For a given behavior, our system trains a Support Vector Machine (SVM) that predicts the 3D locations ...

In this work we present a set of integrated methods that enable an RFID-enabled mobile manipulator to approach and grasp an object to which a self-adhesive passive (battery-free) UHF RFID tag has been affixed. Our primary ...

We present a novel interface for human-robot interaction that enables a human to intuitively and unambiguously se- lect a 3D location in the world and communicate it to a mo- bile robot. The human points at a location of ...

We present a new behavior selection system for human-robot interaction that maps virtual buttons overlaid on the physical environment to the robotpsilas behaviors, thereby creating a clickable world. The user clicks on a ...

Instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs) involve physical interactions with diverse mechanical systems found within human environments. In this paper, we describe our efforts to capture the everyday mechanics of ...

Assistive mobile manipulators have the potential to one day serve as surrogates and helpers for people with disabilities, giving them the freedom to perform tasks such as scratching an itch, picking up a cup, or socializing ...

Visual features can help predict if a manipulation behavior will succeed at a given location. For example, the success of a behavior that flips light switches depends on the location of the switch. We present methods that ...