7 papers
Soft and Compliant Contact-Rich Hair Manipulation and Care
Uksang Yoo, Nathaniel Dennler, Eliot Xing +4
Hair care robots can help address labor shortages in elderly care while enabling those with limited mobility to maintain their hair-related identity. We present MOE-Hair, a soft ro…
HRIBench: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Real-Time Human Perception in Human-Robot Interaction
Zhonghao Shi, Enyu Zhao, Nathaniel Dennler +6
Real-time human perception is crucial for effective human-robot interaction (HRI). Large vision-language models (VLMs) offer promising generalizable perceptual capabilities but oft…
Modeling Personalized Difficulty of Rehabilitation Exercises Using Causal Trees
Nathaniel Dennler, Zhonghao Shi, Uksang Yoo +2
Rehabilitation robots are often used in game-like interactions for rehabilitation to increase a person's motivation to complete rehabilitation exercises. By adjusting exercise diff…
Contrastive Learning from Exploratory Actions: Leveraging Natural Interactions for Preference Elicitation
Nathaniel Dennler, Stefanos Nikolaidis, Maja MatariÄ
People have a variety of preferences for how robots behave. To understand and reason about these preferences, robots aim to learn a reward function that describes how aligned robot…
Designing Robot Identity: The Role of Voice, Clothing, and Task on Robot Gender Perception
Nathaniel S. Dennler, Mina Kian, Stefanos Nikolaidis +1
Perceptions of gender are a significant aspect of human-human interaction, and gender has wide-reaching social implications for robots deployed in contexts where they are expected…
Improving User Experience in Preference-Based Optimization of Reward Functions for Assistive Robots
Nathaniel Dennler, Zhonghao Shi, Stefanos Nikolaidis +1
Assistive robots interact with humans and must adapt to different users' preferences to be effective. An easy and effective technique to learn non-expert users' preferences is thro…