Teledrive: An Embodied AI based Telepresence System

This article presents Teledrive, a telepresence robotic system with embodied AI features that empowers an operator to navigate the telerobot in any unknown remote place with minimal human intervention. We conceive Teledrive in the context of democratizing remote care-giving for elderly citizens as well as for isolated patients, affected by contagious diseases. In particular, this paper focuses on the problem of navigating to a rough target area (like bedroom or kitchen) rather than pre-specified point destinations. This ushers in a unique AreaGoal based navigation feature, which has not been explored in depth in the contemporary solutions. Further, we describe an edge computing-based software system built on a WebRTC-based communication framework to realize the aforementioned scheme through an easy-to-use speech-based human-robot interaction. Moreover, to enhance the ease of operation for the remote caregiver, we incorporate a person following feature, whereby a robot follows a person on the move in its premises as directed by the operator. Moreover, the system presented is loosely coupled with specific robot hardware, unlike the existing solutions. We have evaluated the efficacy of the proposed system through baseline experiments, user study, and real-life deployment.

Anticipate & Collab: Data-driven Task Anticipation and Knowledge-driven Planning for Human-robot Collaboration

An agent assisting humans in daily living activities can collaborate more effectively by anticipating upcoming tasks. Data-driven methods represent the state of the art in task anticipation, planning, and related problems, but these methods are resource-hungry and opaque. Our prior work introduced a proof of concept framework that used an LLM to anticipate 3 high-level tasks that served as goals for a classical planning system that computed a sequence of low-level actions for the agent to achieve these goals. This paper describes DaTAPlan, our framework that significantly extends our prior work toward human-robot collaboration. Specifically, DaTAPlan planner computes actions for an agent and a human to collaboratively and jointly achieve the tasks anticipated by the LLM, and the agent automatically adapts to unexpected changes in human action outcomes and preferences. We evaluate DaTAPlan capabilities in a realistic simulation environment, demonstrating accurate task anticipation, effective human-robot collaboration, and the ability to adapt to unexpected changes. Project website: https://dataplan-hrc.github.io

CLIPGraphs: Multimodal Graph Networks to Infer Object-Room Affinities

This paper introduces a novel method for determining the best room to place an object in, for embodied scene rearrangement. While state-of-the-art approaches rely on large language models (LLMs) or reinforcement learned (RL) policies for this task, our approach, CLIPGraphs, efficiently combines commonsense domain knowledge, data-driven methods, and recent advances in multimodal learning. Specifically, it (a)encodes a knowledge graph of prior human preferences about the room location of different objects in home environments, (b) incorporates vision-language features to support multimodal queries based on images or text, and (c) uses a graph network to learn object-room affinities based on embeddings of the prior knowledge and the vision-language features. We demonstrate that our approach provides better estimates of the most appropriate location of objects from a benchmark set of object categories in comparison with state-of-the-art baselines

Sequence-Agnostic Multi-Object Navigation

The Multi-Object Navigation (MultiON) task requires a robot to localize an instance (each) of multiple object classes. It is a fundamental task for an assistive robot in a home or a factory. Existing methods for MultiON have viewed this as a direct extension of Object Navigation (ON), the task of localising an instance of one object class, and are pre-sequenced, i.e., the sequence in which the object classes are to be explored is provided in advance. This is a strong limitation in practical applications characterized by dynamic changes. This paper describes a deep reinforcement learning framework for sequence-agnostic MultiON based on an actor-critic architecture and a suitable reward specification. Our framework leverages past experiences and seeks to reward progress toward individual as well as multiple target object classes. We use photo-realistic scenes from the Gibson benchmark dataset in the AI Habitat 3D simulation environment to experimentally show that our method performs better than a pre-sequenced approach and a state of the art ON method extended to MultiON.

Spatial Relation Graph and Graph Convolutional Network for Object Goal Navigation

This paper describes a framework for the object-goal navigation task, which requires a robot to find and move to the closest instance of a target object class from a random starting position. The framework uses a history of robot trajectories to learn a Spatial Relational Graph (SRG) and Graph Convolutional Network (GCN)-based embeddings for the likelihood of proximity of different semantically-labeled regions and the occurrence of different object classes in these regions. To locate a target object instance during evaluation, the robot uses Bayesian inference and the SRG to estimate the visible regions, and uses the learned GCN embeddings to rank visible regions and select the region to explore next.

Object Goal Navigation using Data Regularized Q-Learning

Object Goal Navigation requires a robot to find and navigate to an instance of a target object class in a previously unseen environment. Our framework incrementally builds a semantic map of the environment over time, and then repeatedly selects a long-term goal ('where to go') based on the semantic map to locate the target object instance. Long-term goal selection is formulated as a vision-based deep reinforcement learning problem. Specifically, an Encoder Network is trained to extract high-level features from a semantic map and select a long-term goal. In addition, we incorporate data augmentation and Q-function regularization to make the long-term goal selection more effective. We report experimental results using the photo-realistic Gibson benchmark dataset in the AI Habitat 3D simulation environment to demonstrate substantial performance improvement on standard measures in comparison with a state of the art data-driven baseline.

Talk-to-Resolve: Combining scene understanding and spatial dialogue to resolve granular task ambiguity for a collocated robot

The utility of collocating robots largely depends on the easy and intuitive interaction mechanism with the human. If a robot accepts task instruction in natural language, first, it has to understand the user's intention by decoding the instruction. However, while executing the task, the robot may face unforeseeable circumstances due to the variations in the observed scene and therefore requires further user intervention. In this article, we present a system called Talk-to-Resolve (TTR) that enables a robot to initiate a coherent dialogue exchange with the instructor by observing the scene visually to resolve the impasse. Through dialogue, it either finds a cue to move forward in the original plan, an acceptable alternative to the original plan, or affirmation to abort the task altogether. To realize the possible stalemate, we utilize the dense captions of the observed scene and the given instruction jointly to compute the robot's next action. We evaluate our system based on a data set of initial instruction and situational scene pairs. Our system can identify the stalemate and resolve them with appropriate dialogue exchange with 82% accuracy. Additionally, a user study reveals that the questions from our systems are more natural (4.02 on average on a scale of 1 to 5) as compared to a state-of-the-art (3.08 on average).

Interpretable Feature Recommendation for Signal Analytics

This paper presents an automated approach for interpretable feature recommendation for solving signal data analytics problems. The method has been tested by performing experiments on datasets in the domain of prognostics where interpretation of features is considered very important. The proposed approach is based on Wide Learning architecture and provides means for interpretation of the recommended features. It is to be noted that such an interpretation is not available with feature learning approaches like Deep Learning (such as Convolutional Neural Network) or feature transformation approaches like Principal Component Analysis. Results show that the feature recommendation and interpretation techniques are quite effective for the problems at hand in terms of performance and drastic reduction in time to develop a solution. It is further shown by an example, how this human-in-loop interpretation system can be used as a prescriptive system.

Automation of Feature Engineering for IoT Analytics

This paper presents an approach for automation of interpretable feature selection for Internet Of Things Analytics (IoTA) using machine learning (ML) techniques. Authors have conducted a survey over different people involved in different IoTA based application development tasks. The survey reveals that feature selection is the most time consuming and niche skill demanding part of the entire workflow. This paper shows how feature selection is successfully automated without sacrificing the decision making accuracy and thereby reducing the project completion time and cost of hiring expensive resources. Several pattern recognition principles and state of art (SoA) ML techniques are followed to design the overall approach for the proposed automation. Three data sets are considered to establish the proof-of-concept. Experimental results show that the proposed automation is able to reduce the time for feature selection to $2$ days instead of $4-6$ months which would have been required in absence of the automation. This reduction in time is achieved without any sacrifice in the accuracy of the decision making process. Proposed method is also compared against Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP) model as most of the state of the art works on IoTA uses MLP based Deep Learning. Moreover the feature selection method is compared against SoA feature reduction technique namely Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and its variants. The results obtained show that the proposed method is effective.

Towards Wide Learning: Experiments in Healthcare

In this paper, a Wide Learning architecture is proposed that attempts to automate the feature engineering portion of the machine learning (ML) pipeline. Feature engineering is widely considered as the most time consuming and expert knowledge demanding portion of any ML task. The proposed feature recommendation approach is tested on 3 healthcare datasets: a) PhysioNet Challenge 2016 dataset of phonocardiogram (PCG) signals, b) MIMIC II blood pressure classification dataset of photoplethysmogram (PPG) signals and c) an emotion classification dataset of PPG signals. While the proposed method beats the state of the art techniques for 2nd and 3rd dataset, it reaches 94.38% of the accuracy level of the winner of PhysioNet Challenge 2016. In all cases, the effort to reach a satisfactory performance was drastically less (a few days) than manual feature engineering.