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A conventional adopted method for operating a waiter robot is based on the static position control, where predefined goal positions are marked on a map. However, this solution is not optimal in a dynamic setting, such as in a coffee shop or an outdoor catering event, because the customers often change their positions. This article explores an alternative human-robot interface design where a human operator communicates the identity of the customer to the robot instead. Inspired by how human communicates, we propose a framework for communicating a visual goal to the robot, through interactive two-way communications. The framework exploits concepts from two machine learning domains: human-in-the-loop machine learning, where active learning is used to acquire informative data, and deep metric learning, where a suitable embedding can improve the learning ability of a classifier. We also propose novel class imbalance handling techniques, which aim to actively alleviate the class imbalance problem found to be important in this mode of communication. The framework is evaluated using publicly available pedestrian datasets. We demonstrate that the proposed framework can help reduce the number of required two-way interactions and increases the robustness of the predictive model. We successfully implement the framework on a mobile robot for a delivery service in a cafe-like environment. Through the online visual goal human-robot communication, the robot can detect, recognize, and autonomously navigate to the target customer.

This paper presents an integrated robotic platform for advanced collaborative robots and demonstrates an application of multiple robots collaboratively transporting an object to different positions in a factory environment. The proposed platform integrates a drone, a mobile manipulator robot, and a dual-arm robot to work autonomously, while also collaborating with a human worker.

Many CPG-based locomotion models have a problem known as the tracking error problem, where the mismatch between the CPG driving signal and the state of the robot can cause undesirable behaviours for legged robots. Towards alleviating this problem, we introduce a mechanism that modulates the CPG signal using the robot’s interoceptive information. The key concept is to generate a driving signal that is easier for the robot to follow, yet can drive the locomotion of the robot. This can be done by nudging the CPG signal in the direction of lower tracking error, which can be analytically calculated. Unlike other reactive CPG, the proposed method does not rely on any parametric learning ability to adjust the shape of the signal, making it a unique option for a biological adaptive motor control. Our experiment results show that the proposed method successfully reduces the tracking error. We also show that the CPG signal, regulated by the proposed method, is robust to perturbation and can smoothly return back to the default pattern.

In most contemporary work in deep reinforcement learning (DRL), agents are trained in simulated environments. Not only are simulated environments fast and inexpensive, they are also ‘safe’. By contrast, training in a real world environment (using robots, for example) is not only slow and costly, but actions can also result in irreversible damage, either to the environment or to the agent (robot) itself. In this paper, we consider taking advantage of the inherent safety in computer simulation by extending the Deep Q-Network (DQN) algorithm with an ability to measure and take risk. In essence, we propose a novel DRL algorithm that encourages risk-seeking behaviour to enhance information acquisition during training. We demonstrate the merit of the exploration heuristic by (i) arguing that our risk estimator implicitly contains both parametric uncertainty and inherent uncertainty of the environment which are propagated back through Temporal Difference error across many time steps and (ii) evaluating our method on three games in the Atari domain and showing that the technique works well on Montezuma’s Revenge, a game that epitomises the challenge of sparse reward.