We propose a comparative judgement scheme for grading short answer questions in an online class. The scheme works by asking students to answer short answer questions. Then a multiple choice question is created whose choices are the answers given by students. We show that we can formulate a probabilistic graphical model for this scheme which lets us infer each students proficiency for answering and grading questions.

In this paper we present a design methodology for mapping the configuration space of multirobot systems in a warehouse. The method generates a tree topology with robot and terminal nodes. In the most general case multirobot motion planning problems are NP-complete. But, we show that pebble motion problems in the resultant tree topology are always feasible. Our method uses an integer programming formulation to find such a solution.

We introduce the Motion Grammar, a powerful new representation for robot decision making, and validate its properties through the successful implementation of a physical human-robot game. The Motion Grammar is a formal tool for task decomposition and hybrid control in the presence of significant online uncertainty. In this paper, we describe the Motion Grammar, introduce some of the formal guarantees it can provide, and represent the entire game of human-robot chess through a single formal language. This language includes game-play, safe handling of human motion, uncertainty in piece positions, misplaced and collapsed pieces. We demonstrate the simple and effective language formulation through experiments on a 14-DOF manipulator interacting with 32 objects (chess pieces) and an unpredictable human adversary.

This paper presents three effective manipulation strategies for wheeled, dynamically balancing robots with articulated links. By comparing these strategies through analysis, simulation and robot experiments, we show that contact placement and body posture have a significant impact on the robot's ability to accelerate and displace environment objects. Given object geometry and friction parameters we determine the most effective methods for utilizing wheel torque to perform non-prehensile manipulation.