UMass Machine Learning and Friends Lunch | Main / Exploring Human-Inspired Haptic Interaction Skills For Robots

Abstract:

A human-inspired understanding of the world can enhance robots' abilities to successfully and safely explore the world around them in applications from successfully manipulating delicate objects to playfully high-fiving a human teammate. Particularly in situations where human skills outweigh modern robot capabilities, data collected from people can yield models for successful robot behaviors. In this talk, I will cover my past cognitive robotics work on helping the PR2 robot to explore and label objects with haptic adjectives and my more recent work on allowing the Baxter robot to label and reciprocate human motions.

Bio:

Naomi Fitter is a PhD Candidate and member of the Haptics Group in the University of Pennsylvania GRASP Lab, working with Professor Katherine Kuchenbecker. She investigates socially relevant physical human-robot interactions like human-robot high fives and hand-clapping games. Her work involves a combination of haptics, socially assistive robotics, entertaining robotics, and physical human-robot interaction.