A Collaborative Artificial Intelligence System (CAIS) performs actions in collaboration with the human to achieve a common goal. CAISs can use a trained AI model to control human-system interaction, or they can use human interaction to dynamically learn from humans in an online fashion. In online learning with human feedback, the AI model evolves by monitoring human interaction through the system sensors in the learning state, and actuates the autonomous components of the CAIS based on the learning in the operational state. Therefore, any disruptive event affecting these sensors may affect the AI model's ability to make accurate decisions and degrade the CAIS performance. Consequently, it is of paramount importance for CAIS managers to be able to automatically track the system performance to understand the resilience of the CAIS upon such disruptive events. In this paper, we provide a new framework to model CAIS performance when the system experiences a disruptive event. With our framework, we introduce a model of performance evolution of CAIS. The model is equipped with a set of measures that aim to support CAIS managers in the decision process to achieve the required resilience of the system. We tested our framework on a real-world case study of a robot collaborating online with the human, when the system is experiencing a disruptive event. The case study shows that our framework can be adopted in CAIS and integrated into the online execution of the CAIS activities.

Despite many recent advances both in terms of analytical and learning based approaches, grasping remains a challenging open problem in robotic manipulation. The major-ity of the research focuses on enhancing grasping capabilities by designing strategies characterized by different degree of intelligence for a given gripper. Our proposed approach to effective grasping is different: instead of optimizing a policy given a single gripper geometry, we search for the tool in order to grasp a given set of objects. To do so, we first introduce a parametrization for the geometry of two common families of grippers: two-fingers parallel-jaw and suction-cup vacuum. Then we present a novel grasp score discussing its properties for gripper design. Thanks to these we can formally cast the gripper design as an optimization problem, tackled with existing global optimization frameworks. Numerical findings on a set of industrial objects show effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Dense Object Nets (DONs) by Florence, Manuelli and Tedrake (2018) introduced dense object descriptors as a novel visual object representation for the robotics community. It is suitable for many applications including object grasping, policy learning, etc. DONs map an RGB image depicting an object into a descriptor space image, which implicitly encodes key features of an object invariant to the relative camera pose. Impressively, the self-supervised training of DONs can be applied to arbitrary objects and can be evaluated and deployed within hours. However, the training approach relies on accurate depth images and faces challenges with small, reflective objects, typical for industrial settings, when using consumer grade depth cameras. In this paper we show that given a 3D model of an object, we can generate its descriptor space image, which allows for supervised training of DONs. We rely on Laplacian Eigenmaps (LE) to embed the 3D model of an object into an optimally generated space. While our approach uses more domain knowledge, it can be efficiently applied even for smaller and reflective objects, as it does not rely on depth information. We compare the training methods on generating 6D grasps for industrial objects and show that our novel supervised training approach improves the pick-and-place performance in industry-relevant tasks.

Enabling robots to quickly learn manipulation skills is an important, yet challenging problem. Such manipulation skills should be flexible, e.g., be able adapt to the current workspace configuration. Furthermore, to accomplish complex manipulation tasks, robots should be able to sequence several skills and adapt them to changing situations. In this work, we propose a rapid robot skill-sequencing algorithm, where the skills are encoded by object-centric hidden semi-Markov models. The learned skill models can encode multimodal (temporal and spatial) trajectory distributions. This approach significantly reduces manual modeling efforts, while ensuring a high degree of flexibility and re-usability of learned skills. Given a task goal and a set of generic skills, our framework computes smooth transitions between skill instances. To compute the corresponding optimal end-effector trajectory in task space we rely on Riemannian optimal controller. We demonstrate this approach on a 7 DoF robot arm for industrial assembly tasks.

A wide range of discrete planning problems can be solved optimally using graph search algorithms. However, optimal search quickly becomes infeasible with increased complexity of a problem. In such a case, heuristics that guide the planning process towards the goal state can increase performance considerably. Unfortunately, heuristics are often unavailable or need manual and time-consuming engineering. Building upon recent results on applying deep learning to learn generalized reactive policies, we propose to learn heuristics by imitation learning. After learning heuristics based on optimal examples, they are used to guide a classical search algorithm to solve unseen tasks. However, directly applying learned heuristics in search algorithms such as A∗ breaks optimality guarantees, since learned heuristics are not necessarily admissible. Therefore, we (i) propose a novel method that utilizes learned heuristics to guide Focal Search A∗, a variant of A∗ with guarantees on bounded suboptimality; (ii) compare the complexity and performance of jointly learning individual policies for multiple robots with an approach that learns one policy for all robots; (iii) thoroughly examine how learned policies generalize to previously unseen environments and demonstrate considerably improved performance in a simulated complex dynamic coverage problem.