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Recent evidence has shown that, contrary to expectations, it is difficult for users, especially novices, to teach robots tasks through LfD. This paper introduces a framework that leverages MT algorithms to train novices to become better teachers of robots, and verifies whether such teaching ability is retained beyond the period of training and generalises such that novices teach robots more effectively, even for skills for which training has not been received. A between-subjects study is reported, in which novice teachers are asked to teach simple motor skills to a robot. The results demonstrate that subjects that receive training show average 78.83% improvement in teaching ability (as measured by accuracy of the skill learnt by the robot), and average 63.69% improvement in the teaching of new skills not included as part of the training.

When objects are packed in a cluster, physical interactions are unavoidable. Such interactions emerge because of the objects geometric features; some of these features promote entanglement, while others create repulsion. When entanglement occurs, the cluster exhibits a global, complex behaviour, which arises from the stochastic interactions between objects. We hereby refer to such a cluster as an entangled granular metamaterial. We investigate the geometrical features of the objects which make up the cluster, henceforth referred to as grains, that maximise entanglement. We hypothesise that a cluster composed from grains with high propensity to tangle, will also show propensity to interact with a second cluster of tangled objects. To demonstrate this, we use the entangled granular metamaterials to perform complex robotic picking tasks, where conventional grippers struggle. We employ an electromagnet to attract the metamaterial (ferromagnetic) and drop it onto a second cluster of objects (targets, non-ferromagnetic). When the electromagnet is re-activated, the entanglement ensures that both the metamaterial and the targets are picked, with varying degrees of physical engagement that strongly depend on geometric features. Interestingly, although the metamaterials structural arrangement is random, it creates repeatable and consistent interactions with a second tangled media, enabling robust picking of the latter.

Background: Understanding healthy human brain function is crucial to identify and map pathological tissue within it. Whilst previous studies have mapped intracranial EEG (icEEG) from non-epileptogenic brain regions, these maps do not consider the effects of age and sex. Further, most existing work on icEEG has often suffered from a small sample size due to the modality's invasive nature. Here, we substantially increase the subject sample size compared to existing literature, to create a multi-centre, normative map of brain activity which additionally considers the effects of age, sex and recording hospital. Methods: Using interictal icEEG recordings from n = 502 subjects originating from 15 centres, we constructed a normative map of non-pathological brain activity by regressing age and sex on relative band power in five frequency bands, whilst accounting for the hospital effect. Results: Recording hospital significantly impacted normative icEEG maps in all frequency bands, and age was a more influential predictor of band power than sex. The age effect varied by frequency band, but no spatial patterns were observed at the region-specific level. Certainty about regression coefficients was also frequency band specific and moderately impacted by sample size. Conclusion: The concept of a normative map is well-established in neuroscience research and particularly relevant to the icEEG modality, which does not allow healthy control baselines. Our key results regarding the hospital site and age effect guide future work utilising normative maps in icEEG.

Human motion prediction and trajectory forecasting are essential in human motion analysis. Nowadays, sensors can be seamlessly integrated into clothing using cutting-edge electronic textile (e-textile) technology, allowing long-term recording of human movements outside the laboratory. Motivated by the recent findings that clothing-attached sensors can achieve higher activity recognition accuracy than body-attached sensors. This work investigates the performance of human motion prediction using clothing-attached sensors compared with body-attached sensors. It reports experiments in which statistical models learnt from the movement of loose clothing are used to predict motion patterns of the body of robotically simulated and real human behaviours. Counterintuitively, the results show that fabric-attached sensors can have better motion prediction performance than rigid-attached sensors. Specifically, The fabric-attached sensor can improve the accuracy up to 40% and requires up to 80% less duration of the past trajectory to achieve high prediction accuracy (i.e., 95%) compared to the rigid-attached sensor.

The availability of large amounts of informative data is crucial for successful machine learning. However, in domains with sensitive information, the release of high-utility data which protects the privacy of individuals has proven challenging. Despite progress in differential privacy and generative modeling for privacy-preserving data release in the literature, only a few approaches optimize for machine learning utility: most approaches only take into account statistical metrics on the data itself and fail to explicitly preserve the loss metrics of machine learning models that are to be subsequently trained on the generated data. In this paper, we introduce a data release framework, 3A (Approximate, Adapt, Anonymize), to maximize data utility for machine learning, while preserving differential privacy. We also describe a specific implementation of this framework that leverages mixture models to approximate, kernel-inducing points to adapt, and Gaussian differential privacy to anonymize a dataset, in order to ensure that the resulting data is both privacy-preserving and high utility. We present experimental evidence showing minimal discrepancy between performance metrics of models trained on real versus privatized datasets, when evaluated on held-out real data. We also compare our results with several privacy-preserving synthetic data generation models (such as differentially private generative adversarial networks), and report significant increases in classification performance metrics compared to state-of-the-art models. These favorable comparisons show that the presented framework is a promising direction of research, increasing the utility of low-risk synthetic data release for machine learning., Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, AAAI Workshop

Human activity recognition has become an attractive research area with the development of on-body wearable sensing technology. With comfortable electronic-textiles, sensors can be embedded into clothing so that it is possible to record human movement outside the laboratory for long periods. However, a long-standing issue is how to deal with motion artefacts introduced by movement of clothing with respect to the body. Surprisingly, recent empirical findings suggest that cloth-attached sensor can actually achieve higher accuracy of activity recognition than rigid-attached sensor, particularly when predicting from short time-windows. In this work, a probabilistic model is introduced in which this improved accuracy and resposiveness is explained by the increased statistical distance between movements recorded via fabric sensing. The predictions of the model are verified in simulated and real human motion capture experiments, where it is evident that this counterintuitive effect is closely captured.

The picking of one or more objects from an unsorted pile continues to be non-trivial for robotic systems. This is especially so when the pile consists of a granular material (GM) containing individual items that tangle with one another, causing more to be picked out than desired. One of the key features of such tangle-prone GMs is the presence of protrusions extending out from the main body of items in the pile. This work characterises the role the latter play in causing mechanical entanglement and their impact on picking consistency. It reports experiments in which picking GMs with different protrusion lengths (PLs) results in up to 76% increase in picked mass variance, suggesting PL to be an informative feature in the design of picking strategies. Moreover, to counter this effect, it proposes a new spread-and-pick (SnP) approach that significantly reduces tangling, making picking more consistent. Compared to prior approaches that seek to pick from a tangle-free point in the pile, the proposed method results in a decrease in picking error (PE) of up to 51%, and shows good generalisation to previously unseen GMs.

Learning from demonstration (LfD) is commonly considered to be a natural and intuitive way to allow novice users to teach motor skills to robots. However, it is important to acknowledge that the effectiveness of LfD is heavily dependent on the quality of teaching, something that may not be assured with novices. It remains an open question as to the most effective way of guiding demonstrators to produce informative demonstrations beyond ad hoc advice for specific teaching tasks. To this end, this paper investigates the use of machine teaching to derive an index for determining the quality of demonstrations and evaluates its use in guiding and training novices to become better teachers. Experiments with a simple learner robot suggest that guidance and training of teachers through the proposed approach can lead to up to 66.5% decrease in error in the learnt skill., Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures

In recent years, there has been a booming shift in the development of versatile, autonomous robots by introducing means to intuitively teach robots task-oriented behaviour by demonstration. In this paper, a method based on programming by demonstration is proposed to learn null space policies from constrained motion data. The main advantage to using this is generalisation of a task by retargeting a systems redundancy as well as the capability to fully replace an entire system with another of varying link number and lengths while still accurately repeating a task subject to the same constraints. The effectiveness of the method has been demonstrated in a 3-link simulation and a real world experiment using a human subject as the demonstrator and is verified through task reproduction on a 7DoF physical robot. In simulation, the method works accurately with even as little as five data points producing errors less than 10^-14. The approach is shown to outperform the current state-of-the-art approach in a simulated 3DoF robot manipulator control problem where motions are reproduced using learnt constraints. Retargeting of a systems null space component is also demonstrated in a task where controlling how redundancy is resolved allows for obstacle avoidance. Finally, the approach is verified in a real world experiment using demonstrations from a human subject where the learnt task space trajectory is transferred onto a 7DoF physical robot of a different embodiment.

Compliant robotics have seen successful applications in energy efficient locomotion and cyclic manipulation. However, exploitation of variable physical impedance for energy efficient sequential movements has not been extensively addressed. This work employs a hierarchical approach to encapsulate low-level optimal control for sub-movement generation into an outer loop of iterative policy improvement, thereby leveraging the benefits of both optimal control and reinforcement learning. The framework enables optimizing efficiency trade-off for minimal energy expenses in a model-free manner, by taking account of cost function weighting, variable impedance exploitation, and transition timing -- which are associated with the skill of compliance. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated using two consecutive reaching tasks on a variable impedance actuator. The results demonstrate significant energy saving by improving the skill of compliance, with an electrical consumption reduction of about 30% measured in a physical robot experiment., Comment: preprint for submission, 15 pages

Shared e-scooters have become a familiar sight in many cities around the world. Yet the role they play in the mobility space is still poorly understood. This paper presents a study of the use of Bird e-scooters in the city of Atlanta. Starting with raw data which contains the location of available Birds over time, the study identifies trips and leverages the Google Places API to associate each trip origin and destination with a Point of Interest (POI). The resulting trip data is then used to understand the role of e-scooters in mobility by clustering trips using 10 collections of POIs, including business, food and recreation, parking, transit, health, and residential. The trips between these POI clusters reveal some surprising, albeit sensible, findings about the role of e-scooters in mobility, as well as the time of the day where they are most popular.

Learning from demonstration allows for rapid deployment of robot manipulators to a great many tasks, by relying on a person showing the robot what to do rather than programming it. While this approach provides many opportunities, measuring, evaluating and improving the person's teaching ability has remained largely unexplored in robot manipulation research. To this end, a model for learning from demonstration is presented here which incorporates the teacher's understanding of, and influence on, the learner. The proposed model is used to clarify the teacher's objectives during learning from demonstration, providing new views on how teaching failures and efficiency can be defined. The benefit of this approach is shown in two experiments (N=30 and N=36, respectively), which highlight the difficulty teachers have in providing effective demonstrations, and show how ~169-180% improvement in teaching efficiency can be achieved through evaluation and feedback shaped by the proposed framework, relative to unguided teaching., Comment: Preprint for International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR) submission

Learning from Demonstration depends on a robot learner generalising its learned model to unseen conditions, as it is not feasible for a person to provide a demonstration set that accounts for all possible variations in non-trivial tasks. While there are many learning methods that can handle interpolation of observed data effectively, extrapolation from observed data offers a much greater challenge. To address this problem of generalisation, this paper proposes a modified Task-Parameterised Gaussian Mixture Regression method that considers the relevance of task parameters during trajectory generation, as determined by variance in the data. The benefits of the proposed method are first explored using a simulated reaching task data set. Here it is shown that the proposed method offers far-reaching, low-error extrapolation abilities that are different in nature to existing learning methods. Data collected from novice users for a real-world manipulation task is then considered, where it is shown that the proposed method is able to effectively reduce grasping performance errors by ${\sim30\%}$ and extrapolate to unseen grasp targets under real-world conditions. These results indicate the proposed method serves to benefit novice users by placing less reliance on the user to provide high quality demonstration data sets., Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, submitted to 2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

Energy efficiency is a crucial issue towards longterm deployment of compliant robots in the real world. In the context of variable impedance actuators (VIAs), one of the main focuses has been on improving energy efficiency through reduction of energy consumption. However, the harvesting of dissipated energy in such systems remains under-explored. This study proposes a novel variable damping module design enabling energy regeneration in VIAs by exploiting the regenerative braking effect of DC motors. The proposed damping module uses four switches to combine regenerative and dynamic braking, in a hybrid approach that enables energy regeneration without a reduction in the range of damping achievable. A physical implementation on a simple VIA mechanism is presented in which the regenerative properties of the proposed module are characterised and compared against theoretical predictions. To investigate the role of variable regenerative damping in terms of energy efficiency of longterm operation, experiments are reported in which the VIA equipped with the proposed damping module performs sequential reaching to a series of stochastic targets. The results indicate that the combination of variable stiffness and variable regenerative damping is preferable to achieve the optimal trade-off between task performance and energy efficiency. Use of the latter results in a 25% performance improvement on overall performance metrics (incorporating reaching accuracy, settling time, energy consumption and regeneration), over comparable schemes where either stiffness or damping are fixed., Comment: revised version. status: Conditionally accepted. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1808.03143

Increasing research efforts have been made to improve the energy efficiency of variable impedance actuators (VIAs) through reduction of energy consumption. However, the harvesting of dissipated energy in such systems remains underexplored. This study proposes a novel variable damping module design enabling energy regeneration in VIAs by exploiting the regenerative braking effect of DC motors. The proposed damping module uses four switches to combine regenerative and dynamic braking, in a hybrid approach that enables energy regeneration without reduction in the range of damping achievable. Numerical simulations and a physical experiment are presented in which the proposed module shows an optimal trade-off between task performance and energy efficiency., Comment: Accepted to IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2018

This paper introduces the first, open source software library for Constraint Consistent Learning (CCL). It implements a family of data-driven methods that are capable of (i) learning state-independent and -dependent constraints, (ii) decomposing the behaviour of redundant systems into task- and null-space parts, and (iii) uncovering the underlying null space control policy. It is a tool to analyse and decompose many everyday tasks, such as wiping, reaching and drawing. The library also includes several tutorials that demonstrate its use with both simulated and real world data in a systematic way. This paper documents the implementation of the library, tutorials and associated helper methods. The software is made freely available to the community, to enable code reuse and allow users to gain in-depth experience in statistical learning in this area.

With the increase in complexity of robotic systems and the rise in non-expert users, it can be assumed that task constraints are not explicitly known. In tasks where avoiding singularity is critical to its success, this paper provides an approach, especially for non-expert users, for the system to learn the constraints contained in a set of demonstrations, such that they can be used to optimise an autonomous controller to avoid singularity, without having to explicitly know the task constraints. The proposed approach avoids singularity, and thereby unpredictable behaviour when carrying out a task, by maximising the learnt manipulability throughout the motion of the constrained system, and is not limited to kinematic systems. Its benefits are demonstrated through comparisons with other control policies which show that the constrained manipulability of a system learnt through demonstration can be used to avoid singularities in cases where these other policies would fail. In the absence of the systems manipulability subject to a tasks constraints, the proposed approach can be used instead to infer these with results showing errors less than 10^-5 in 3DOF simulated systems as well as 10^-2 using a 7DOF real world robotic system.