Publications by Aude Billard | EPFL Graph Search

Chat with Graph Search

Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.

DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.

This paper describes the design of a robot agent and associated learning algorithms to help children in handwriting acquisition. The main issue lies in how to program a robot to obtain human-like handwriting and then exploit it to teach children. We propose to address this by integrating learning from demonstrations paradigm, which allows the robot to extract a task index from intuitive expert (e.g., adults) demonstrations. We present our work on the development of an algorithm, as well as its validation by

This work follows from a research project, in which we investigate the underlying mechanisms of human imitation and develop a neural model of its core neural circuits. The present paper presents a model of a neural mechanism by which an imitator agent can ...

Many daily tasks involve spatio-temporal coordination between two agents. Study of such coordinated actions in human-human and human-robot interaction has received increased attention of late. In this work, we use the mirror paradigm to study coupling of h ...

Humans manage to communicate action intentions in a non-verbal way, through body posture and movement. We start from this observation to investigate how a robot can decode a human's non-verbal cues during the manipulation of an object, with specific physic ...

In this paper, we present a robotic assistance scheme which allows for impedance compensation with stiffness, damping, and mass parameters for hand manipulation tasks and we apply it to manual welding. The impedance compensation does not assume a preprogra ...

The slogan “robots will pervade our environment” has become a reality. Drones and ground robots are used for commercial purposes while semi-autonomous driving systems are standard accessories to traditional cars. However, while our eyes have been riveted o ...

We seek to augment human manipulation by enabling humans to control two robotic arms in addition to their natural arms using their feet. Thereby, the hands are free to perform tasks of high dexterity, while the feet-controlled arms perform tasks requiring ...

The use of coordinated multi-arm robotic systems allows to preform manipulations of heavy or bulky objects that would otherwise be infeasible for a single-arm robot. This paper concisely introduces our work on coordinated multi-arm control [Salehian et al. ...

We address the difficult problem of catching in-flight objects with uneven shapes. This requires the solution of three complex problems: accurate prediction of the trajectory of fastmoving objects, predicting the feasible catching configuration, and planni ...

This work is part of the Aurora project which investigates the possible use of robots in therapy and education of children with autism (Aurora 2003), based on findings that people with autism enjoy interacting with computers, e.g. (Powell, 1996). In most of our trials we have been using mobile robots, e.g. (Dautenhahn and Werry, 2002). More recently we tested the use of a humanoid robotic doll. In (Dautenhahn and Billard, 2002) we reported on a first set of trials with 14 autistic subjects interacting with

Our homes, offices and urban surroundings are carefully built to be inhabited by us, humans. Tools and furniture are designed to be easily manipulated by the human hand. Floors and stairs are modeled for human-sized legs. For robots to work seamlessly in o ...

A current trend in robotics is to define robot motions so that they can be easily adopted to situations beyond those for which the motion was originally designed. In this work, we show how the challenging task of playing minigolf can be efficiently tackled ...

When the question of who should get access to a communal resource first is uncertain, people often negotiate via nonverbal communication to resolve the conflict. What should a robot be programmed to do when such conflicts arise in Human-Robot Interaction? ...

This article reports on the results of a user study investigating the satisfaction of naïve users conducting two learning by demonstration tasks with the HOAP-3 robot. The main goal of this study was to gain insights on how to ensure a successful as well a ...

Assistive robotics aims to design physically collaborative robots which are able to help human partners with cumbersome tasks; for instance, lifting a heavy plank/guard and inserting it into a frame at the ceiling. To reduce human load-share, it is expected from the robot to perform such tasks in coordination with the human partner. Uncertainty of human behavior and complex dynamics of real-world environments pose challenging problems for robotic systems. It is crucial to employ control frameworks that allo

This paper describes a novel approach to learn an implicit, differentiable distance function for arbitrary configurations of a robotic manipulator used for reactive control. By exploiting GPU processing, we efficiently query the learned collision representation and obtain an implicit distance between the robot and the environment. The differentiable nature of the learned function allows for calculating valid gradients wrt. any robot configuration, providing a repulsive vector field in joint space that can b

Robotic manipulation in dynamic environments often requires seamless transitions between different grasp types to maintain stability and efficiency. However, achieving smooth and adaptive grasp transitions remains a challenge, particularly when dealing with external forces and complex motion constraints. Existing grasp transition strategies often fail to account for varying external forces and do not optimize motion performance effectively. In this work, we propose an Imitation-Guided Bimanual Planning Fram

Decoding the user intention from non-invasive EEG signals is a challenging problem. In this paper, we study the feasibility of predicting the goal for controlling the robot arm in self-paced reaching movements, i.e., spontaneous movements that do not requi ...

A growing trend in humanoid robotics tend at reducing the size of humanoids in order to lower their building costs. While growing small has its advantages, it also has drawbacks. In particular, providing miniature humanoids with the same sensorimotor capabilities as their grown-up peers is a challenge, both in terms of mechanics, electronics and control. The Robota project creates humanoids, whose size should match that of a commercial doll, so that they can be used as part of experiments with autistic chil

Transfer learning is a conceptually-enticing paradigm in pursuit of truly intelligent embodied agents. The core concept—reusing prior knowledge to learn in and from novel situations—is successfully leveraged by humans to handle novel situations. In recent ...

Aude Billard

Chat with Graph Search

Bidirectional Learning of Handwriting Skill in Human-Robot Interaction

View Sensitive Cells as a Neural Basis for the Representation of Others in a Self-Centered Frame of Reference

Cognitive mechanism in synchronized motion: An internal predictive model for manual tracking control

From human action understanding to robot action execution: how the physical properties of handled objects modulate non-verbal cues

Robotic Assistance by Impedance Compensation for Hand Movements While Manual Welding

Safety Concerns Emerging from Robots Navigating in Crowded Pedestrian Areas

Four-Arm Manipulation via Feet Interfaces

Dynamical System-based Motion Planning for Multi-Arm Systems: Reaching for moving objects

Catching Objects in Flight

Effect of repeated exposure of a humanoid robot on children with autism - Can we encourage basic social interaction skills

Towards Reproducing Humans' Exquisite Dexterity and Reactivity

Learning to play minigolf: A dynamical system-based approach

Design of Hesitation Gestures for Nonverbal Human-Robot Negotiation of Conflicts

Teaching a Humanoid: A User Study on Learning by Demonstration with HOAP-3

Reactive Motion Planning for Human-Robot Cooperative Tasks Under Uncertainties

Implicit Distance Functions: Learning and Applications in Control

Imitation-Guided Bimanual Planning for Stable Manipulation under Changing External Forces

Rewards-Driven Control of Robot Arm by Decoding EEG Signals

Development of a Miniature Pair of Eyes With Camera for the Humanoid Robot Robota

Transfer learning in robotics: An upcoming breakthrough? A review of promises and challenges