Open Projects
The Guide Robot
The "flagship" project in my lab is the guide robot - a robot that can guide visually impaired people. The project includes several research questions such as: how to recognize the goal of a handler walking with a robot? How to handle cases where there is a conflict between what the handler wants to do and what the robot thinks they should do? In other words, when and how should such a robot intelligently disobey a command? How to navigate in a social manner around other people? How to learn and adapt to a new handler? For more information about this idea, see the "seeing-eye robot" paper.
Each of the questions above can developed into a research project. Below are some examples for potential or ongoing research in my lab:
Learning Potential Goals of Users from Demonstrations
A goal recognition project which aims to learn what are the set of potential goals a person might have from raw images or from demonstrations, using reinforcement learning. The project involves work in simulation and later on in the real world. This project will rely on a framework presented in the paper "Goal Recognition as Reinforcement Learning".
Artificial Agents as Teachers of
Motor Skill Acquisition
Motor Skill Acquisition
An ongoing project where we aim to make an AI that can suggest a good curriculum for a person to learn a motor skill, like controlling the joystick when playing a specific video game. This is an interdisciplinary project with collaborations with Mechanical engineering, Neuroscience, and Computer science (which is where our contribution takes place). The first paper in this project discusses the question of quantifying a person's skill level in a motor task: "Capturing Skill State in Curriculum Learning forHuman Skill Acquisition"
The Cost of Communication with new Teammates
An ongoing project I'm working on is collaboration with new teammates (e.g. like when you play football with players you never played with before). This topic is generally called ad-hoc teamwork (closely related to zero-shot coordination) and specifically, I'm working with a student who's looking at potential communication channels that can be used to improve such interactions. The first paper in this project is "A penny for your thoughts".
Culture-Dependent Social Navigation
The goal of this project is to study the compliance of social robot navigation within different cultures. As this is a new project, there are no available papers, but you can look at the SCAND dataset to see the type of navigational behavior which will be explored in this project. The data collection process of SCAND will be replicated in Israel to examine the effect of cultural differences. Socially CompliAnt Navigation Dataset
Intent Recognition of Humans Blocking a Service Robot
This project focuses on understanding the intentions of a person blocking a robot. This is a collaboration between academia and industry, with robotics companies that will integrate the algorithms developed in the lab in their robots.
Preferences when Interacting with a Quadruped Robot
This project investigates how people perceive the behavior of a dog-like robot if it "wears" a vest like seeing-eye dogs, being held with a leash, etc. This is an ongoing project at the University of Texas at Austin, and the work will be replicated in Israel to examine the effect of cultural differences. The research methodologies used in the project will the similar to the ones in this paper "Using human-inspired signals..."