Moonshot: Assistive Collaborative Manipulation
The University of Edinburgh and Japan Science & Technology (JST) Collaborative Moonshot Project
Hierarchical Motion Planning Framework for Realising Long-horizon Task
Having robots collaborating alongside humans and assisting them in daily life activities, such as tidying up, is extremely challenging.
Robots need to reason about how to split such complex tasks in simpler subtasks, while being able to safely and robustly accomplish each of the individual subtasks. For instance, picking up the target object, then moving it to the front of the shelf, opening the shelf door, and finally successfully placing the object inside the shelf. Additionally, robots also need to be able to adapt their movements to unpredictable and dynamic changes, such as humans moving around, and to unexpected object properties, including the object turning out to be heavier or softer than anticipated.
In this project, in collaboration with Waseda University in Japan, we develop learning and motion planning methods for realising long-horizon tasks that are adaptable and generalisable to objects of various different properties.
We use the example of stacking several boxes with different hidden properties, such as mass or even content, that require the robot to change the high level (long-horizon) plan, as well as the robot motion itself, such as how fast can it move.
This project directly contributes to the Goal 3 of the Moonshot programme: Realisation of AI robots that autonomously learn, adapt to their environment, evolve in intelligence and act alongside human beings, by 2050.
For more information on the Goal 3 of the Moonshot programme check: Moonshot Programme Goal 3
Project Collaboration Timeline: First Phase (April 1, 2024 to November 30, 2025)
Please check out below our results and events organised as part of the Moonshot programme (in reverse chronological order):
AI in Healthcare Workshop, Edinburgh
May 30, 2024
Contribution Type: Seminar and Live Demonstrations
AI and embodied robotics solutions are playing an increasingly significant role in addressing some of the most pressing grand challenges in healthcare and assisted living in our society. For successful, safe and effective deployment of these fast-changing technologies, it is important that we work closely and collaboratively with different stakeholders.
In this workshop, we bring together end-users in care homes, hospitals and rehabilitation centres; world-leading researchers from academia including European and international consortia; startup companies and established industry players in this space; as well as policymakers and researchers who look at the ethics and governance structures that inform deployment strategies.
Check our workshop website for more information: AI in Healthcare Workshop
Please check out the detailed news item for some pictures of the event.
ATR International Mini-Symposium on Robot Learning, Kyoto
May 20, 2024
Contribution Type: Symposium and Presentations
As robot learning approaches are getting more and more complex and sophisticated, we co-organised a mini-symposium in collaboration with the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR), in Kyoto, for discussing challenges and the latest developments on robot learning. Our host was one of leading human motor control researchers in the world, Prof. Mitsuo Kawato of ATR.
In this symposium, we had the chance of hearing from many robot learning researchers at ATR as well as renowned international researchers, such as Prof. Jan Peters (TUD, Germany) and Prof Ales Ude (Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia). We also presented some of the work we have been developing in the context of the Moonshot programme, with presentations from our UoE SLMC group including Prof. Sethu Vijayakumar, Dr. Namiko Saito, Dr. Joao Moura, and Marina Aoyama, among others.
Please check out the detailed news item.
Cooking Robotics Workshop @ ICRA 2024, Yokohama
May 17, 2024
Contribution Type: Interactive Workshop and Seminar
We invited world-leading research scientists and practitioners for a workshop at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), in Yokohama, Japan, to explore the new frontiers of “robots in cooking” ! We will address various scientific research questions, including hardware, multimodal perception, motion planning and control, experimental methodologies, and benchmarking approaches. The workshop will count with networking opportunities through poster session from young researchers and even exciting live robotic demos from Waseda University and Kawada Robotics Corporation!
Check our workshop website for more information: Cooking Robotics Workshop
Paper Presentation @ ICRA 2024, Yokohama
May 16, 2024
Contribution Type: Conference Paper Publication
Existing Learning from Demonstration (LfD) approaches require a large number of human demonstrations for enabling robots to generalise to unseen objects. In this work, we propose a semi-supervised LfD approach that decouples the learnt model into a haptic representation encoder and a motion generation decoder. This enables us to pre-train the first using a large amount of unsupervised data, easily accessible, while using few-shot LfD to train the second, leveraging the benefits of learning skills from humans. We validate our approach on the wiping task, demonstrating improved performance for sponges with unseen stiffness and surface friction.
Marina Y. Aoyama, Joao Moura, Namiko Saito and Sethu Vijayakumar, Few-Shot Learning of Force-Based Motions From Demonstration Through Pre-training of Haptic Representation, Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2024), Yokohama, Japan (2024). [pdf] [video] [citation]
Meet the Robots @ Edinburgh International Science Festival (EISF)
April 12, 2024
Contribution Type: Outreach Event
We opened our laboratory to the public to showcase our cutting-edge research platforms to inform and engage visitors about the best ways to deliver human-centric assistance and effective human-robot collaborations.
Visitors, both adults and children, had the opportunity to learn more about the world of robotics, through an interactive tour that included demonstrations of humanoid robots, exoskeletons, a showcase of the factory of the future, and finally a chance to directly teleoperate the robots themselves.
Please check out the detailed news item.