Yi-Shiuan Tung

Understanding human intentions is critical for safe and effective human-robot collaboration. While state of the art methods for human goal prediction utilize learned models to account for the uncertainty of human motion data, that data is inherently stochastic and high variance, hindering those models’ utility for interactions requiring coordination, including safety-critical or close-proximity tasks. Our key insight is that robot teammates can deliberately configure shared workspaces prior to interaction in order to reduce the variance in human motion, realizing classifier-agnostic improvements in goal prediction. In this work, we present an algorithmic approach for a robot to arrange physical objects and project “virtual obstacles” using augmented reality in shared human-robot workspaces, optimizing for human legibility over a given set of tasks. We compare our approach against other workspace arrangement strategies using two human-subjects studies, one in a virtual 2D navigation domain and the other in a live tabletop manipulation domain involving a robotic manipulator arm. We evaluate the accuracy of human motion prediction models learned from each condition, demonstrating that our workspace optimization technique with virtual obstacles leads to higher robot prediction accuracy using less training data.

Kitting refers to the task of preparing and grouping necessary parts and tools (or "kits") for assembly in a manufacturing environment. Automating this process simplifies the assembly task for human workers and improves efficiency. Existing automated kitting systems adhere to scripted instructions and predefined heuristics. However, given variability in the availability of parts and logistic delays, the inflexibility of existing systems can limit the overall efficiency of an assembly line. In this paper, we propose a bilevel optimization framework to enable a robot to perform task segmentation-based part selection, kit arrangement, and delivery scheduling to provide custom-tailored kits just in time—i.e., right when they are needed. We evaluate the proposed approach both through a human subjects study (n=18) involving the construction of a flat-pack furniture table and shop-flow simulation based on the data from the study. Our results show that the just-in-time kitting system is objectively more efficient, resilient to upstream shop flow delays, and subjectively more preferable as compared to baseline approaches of using kits defined by rigid task segmentation boundaries defined by the task graph itself or a single kit that includes all parts necessary to assemble a single unit.

In this work, we introduce PokeRRT, a novel motion planning algorithm that demonstrates poking as an effective nonprehensile manipulation skill to enable fast manipulation of objects and increase the size of a robot’s reachable workspace. We showcase poking as a failure recovery tactic used synergistically with pickand-place for resiliency in cases where pick-and-place initially fails or is unachievable. Our experiments demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed framework in planning object trajectories using poking manipulation in uncluttered and cluttered environments. In addition to quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrating the adaptability of PokeRRT to different scenarios in both simulation and real-world settings, our results show the advantages of poking over pushing and grasping in terms of success rate and task time.