This thesis aims to determine the impact that Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices have on social interactions, and then improves the AAC user experience through a user focus design process. AAC devices enable people who cannot speak to communicate with others. Unfortunately, they are tedious to use and make...
Relative to visual and audible communication, haptic perception is quiet, does not require eye contact, can be applied at any point on the human body, and can function in parallel with the other four human senses. Vibrotactile feedback is a method of haptic communication using vibrations applied to the skin....
Social robots benefit from a sense of humor, which requires the ability to recognize and adapt to human responses during playful interactions. Past work on humorous robots has classified audience responses with audio-based and preliminary visual-based methods following the joke punchline. Building on this progress, we conducted a survey of...
Legged robots have consistently captured our collective imagination through various forms of media, from Hollywood films, anime, and viral Youtube videos of robots accomplishing incredible feats of acrobatics. These robots have the potential to navigate our environments, capable of completing tasks that would otherwise require human intervention. However, developing controls...
Multiagent coordination has many real-world applications such as self-driving cars, inventory management, search and rescue, package delivery, traffic management, warehouse management, and transportation. These tasks are generally character-ized by a global team objective that is often temporally sparse - realized only upon completing an episode. The sparsity of the shared...
This dissertation incorporates coalition formation and probabilistic planning towards a domain-independent automated planning solution scalable to multiple heterogeneous robots in complex domains. The first research direction investigates the effectiveness of Task Fusion and introduces heuristics that improve task allocation and result in better quality plans, while requiring lower computational cost...
Labeling videos is costly, time-consuming and tedious. These costs can escalate in applications such as medical diagnosis or autonomous driving where we need domain expertise for annotation. Few-shot action recognition aims to solve this problem by annotation-efficient learning mechanisms.
This thesis presents MetaUVFS as the first Unsupervised Meta-learning algorithm for...
Robots have the potential to protect health care workers, provide patient care, and ultimately save lives in infectious disease outbreaks. Nevertheless, infectious disease outbreak scenarios present unique technological and social challenges for robotics. This work explores what robots can and should do in the fight against infectious diseases. We present...
This thesis outlines the development of new elastomeric materials and manufacturing processes for soft robotics. Specifically, this work describes the development of custom material formulations for use in additive manufacturing, additive manufacturing processing techniques for silicone elastomers, and multi-component additive manufacturing techniques. Material synthesis and processing is a gap in...
Numerous diseases and injuries can limit a person's ability to perform everyday tasks -- things like getting dressed, bathing, and eating. Anything that requires physical activity can be affected; even simple things like turning on the lights can become difficult or impossible. Until recently, the only way for a person...