Sophisticated interaction with objects is one of the activities that
distinguishes intelligent creatures. Robots that are to work in human
environments will need to be able to manipulate objects, to learn about
their properties, and to do so in conjunction with humans. This poses not
just problems in manipulation, but significant challenges in planning,
language, learning, and vision. In particular it poses very difficult
problems in the area of architectures. How should a robot that has
experience of an object via vision, manipulation and dialogue integrate
the information from those different modalities? How can such a robot
plan purposeful activity, but be flexible enough to cope with human
interventions?
In this scenario we have not focussed on research in manipulation, but on
the system level issue raised by a collaborative manipulation task. Our
work includes advances in vision for object categorisation, part based
recognition of objects, human robot interaction, planning and execution
monitoring, and architectures and representations for binding them
together.
In this scenario we have not focussed on research in manipulation, but on
the system level issue raised by a collaborative manipulation task. Our
work includes advances in vision for object categorisation, part based
recognition of objects, human robot interaction, planning and execution
monitoring, and architectures and representations for binding them
together.