HOMESKIES

RoboCup@Home Open Platform League Team

UW's Home Robotics Team

We are a team of researchers from the Human-Centered Robotics lab at the University of Washington entering RoboCup@Home for the first time. Our lab aims to develop general-purpose robots that are both useful for and usable by future users, many of whom may not have a technical background.

Research Interests

End-User Programming

The goal of end-user programming (EUP) is to enable people with limited or no technical background to program robots to perform useful tasks. Our research had resulted in a number of EUP tools spanning different program- ming paradigms, target programmer types, and input/output modalities.

Code3: A System for End-to-End Programming of Mobile Manipulator Robots for Novices and Experts (Code)

Situated Tangible Robot Programming

Learning from Demonstration

Finding a universal solution to this manipulation problem is extremely challenging and it is not feasible for developers to pre-program the robot to use every possible tool. Instead, our work seeks to allow end users to program robots by demonstration using their own specific tools.

Learning Generalizable Surface Cleaning Actions from Demonstration

Robot Perception

Many manipulation systems attempt to use 3D models to localize objects in new scenes. But in most cases only parts of the object are relevant for the manipulation task and there is no need to localize the full object. We developed CustomLandmarks to allow users to specify what parts of the environment are relevant for actions they would like to program.

Flexible User Specification of Perceptual Landmarks for Robot Manipulation

Robot Command Taking

We've investigated models that enable robots to robustly understand user commands, as well as planning methods to actually carry out commands in real environments.

Neural Semantic Parsing with Anonymization for Command Understanding in General-Purpose Service Robots (Code)

Open-World Reasoning for Service Robots