There seems to be a solid object inside.""What other toppings do you usually like on your pizza?" Figure 1: We imbued a robot with curious behaviors.The figure shows two examples.Left: The robot shakes a container to check whether there is an object inside.Right: The robot asks for the person's preferences.

The gaze of a person tends to reflect their interest. This work explores what happens when this statement is taken literally and applied to robots. Here we present a robot system that employs a moving robot head with a screen-based eye model that can direct the robot’s gaze to points in physical space and present a reflection-like mirror image of the attended region on top of each eye. We conducted a user study with 33 participants, who were asked to instruct the robot to perform pick-and-place tasks, monitor the robot’s task execution, and interrupt it in case of erroneous actions. Despite a deliberate lack of instructions about the role of the eyes and a very brief system exposure, participants felt more aware about the robot’s information processing, detected erroneous actions earlier, and rated the user experience higher when eye-based mirroring was enabled compared to non-reflective eyes. These results suggest a beneficial and intuitive utilization of the introduced method in cooperative human-robot interaction.

In the pursuit of fully autonomous robotic systems capable of taking over tasks traditionally performed by humans, the complexity of open-world environments poses a considerable challenge. Addressing this imperative, this study contributes to the field of Large Language Models (LLMs) applied to task and motion planning for robots. We propose a system architecture that orchestrates a seamless interplay between multiple cognitive levels, encompassing reasoning, planning, and motion generation. At its core lies a novel replanning strategy that handles physically grounded, logical, and semantic errors in the generated plans. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed feedback architecture, particularly its impact on executability, correctness, and time complexity via empirical evaluation in the context of a simulation and two intricate real-world scenarios: blocks world, barman and pizza preparation.

How can a robot provide unobtrusive physical support within a group of humans? We present Attentive Support, a novel interaction concept for robots to support a group of humans. It combines scene perception, dialogue acquisition, situation understanding, and behavior generation with the common-sense reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). In addition to following user instructions, Attentive Support is capable of deciding when and how to support the humans, and when to remain silent to not disturb the group. With a diverse set of scenarios, we show and evaluate the robot’s attentive behavior, which supports and helps the humans when required, while not disturbing if no help is needed.

An image based object classification system trained on one domain usually shows decreased performance for other domains if data distributions differ significantly. There exist various domain adaptation approaches that improve generalization between domains. However, those approaches consider during transfer only the restricted setting where supervised samples of all competing classes are available from the source domain. We investigate here the more open and so far overlooked scenario, where during training only a subset of all competing classes is shown in one domain and another subset in another domain. We show the unexpected tendency of a deep learning classifier to use the domain origin as a prominent feature, which is resulting in a poor performance when testing on samples of unseen domain-class combinations. With an existing domain adaptation method this issue can be overcome, while additional unsupervised data of all unseen domain-class combinations is not essential. First results of this overlooked scenario are extensively discussed on a modified MNIST benchmark.

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) are becoming more and more popular. Many of these systems though are limited to specific scenes and often detect risky situations very late so they can only mitigate accidents. These effects are mainly caused by the use of simple physical prediction methods, e.g. to estimate the time-to-contact with another vehicle. In this paper we show an ADAS that extends the functionality of physical collision warnings by additionally estimating potential risks based on implicit predictions. As an example we demonstrate the use of vehicle orientation information for classifying situations. Through this, we can in particular assess the risk of static cars, for which physical prediction does not apply, but which can nevertheless easily cause an accident if they start moving into our driving corridor. The proposed system is evaluated online in a test car and is shown to reliably detect classical risky situations as well as those involving static cars.

We study the problem of actively searching for an object in a three-dimensional (3-D) environment under the constraint of a maximum search time using a visually guided humanoid robot with 26 degrees of freedom. The inherent intractability of the problem is discussed, and a greedy strategy for selecting the best next viewpoint is employed. We describe a target probability updating scheme approximating the optimal solution to the problem, providing an efficient solution to the selection of the best next viewpoint. We employ a hierarchical recognition architecture, inspired by human vision, that uses contextual cues for attending to the view-tuned units at the proper intrinsic scales and for active control of the robotic platform sensor's coordinate frame, which also gives us control of the extrinsic image scale and achieves the proper sequence of pathognomonic views of the scene. The recognition model makes no particular assumptions on shape properties like texture and is trained by showing the object by hand to the robot. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of using state-of-the-art vision-based systems for efficient and reliable object localization in an indoor 3-D environment.

During CAD development and any kind of design optimisation over years a huge amount of geometries accumulate in a design department. To organize and structure these designs with respect to reusability, a hierarchical set of components on different scalings is extracted by the designers. This hierarchy allows to compose designs from several parts and to adapt the composition to the current task. Nevertheless, this hierarchy is imposed by humans and relies on their experiences. In the present paper a computational method is proposed for an unsupervised extraction of design components from a large repository of geometries. Methods known from the field of object and pattern recognition in images are transferred to the 3D design space to detect relevant features of geometries. The non-negative matrix factorization algorithm (NMF) is extended and tuned to the given task for an autonomous detection of design components. The results of the NMF additionally provide an overview on the distribution of these components in the design repository. The extracted components sum up in a parts-based representation which serves as a base for manual or computational design development or optimisation respectively.

Sparse coding is an important approach for the unsupervised learning of sensory features. In this contribution, we present two new methods that extend the traditional sparse coding approach with supervised components. Our goal is to increase the suitability of the learned features for classification tasks while keeping most of their general representation capability. We analyze the effect of the new methods using visualization on artificial data and discuss the results on two object test sets with regard to the properties of the found feature representation.