Collision Avoidance of a Kinodynamically Constrained System from Passive Agents

Robot motion planning in dynamic environments is significantly difficult, especially when the future trajectories of dynamic obstacles are only predictable over a short time interval and can change frequently. Moreover, a robot’s kinodynamic constraints make the task more challenging. This paper proposes a novel collision avoidance scheme for navigating a kinodynamically constrained robot among multiple passive agents with partially predictable behavior. For this purpose, this paper presents a new approach that maps collision avoidance and kinodynamic constraints on robot motion as geometrical bounds of its control space. This was achieved by extending the concept of nonlinear velocity obstacles to incorporate the robot’s kinodynamic constraints. The proposed concept of bounded control space was used to design a collision avoidance strategy for a car-like robot by employing a predict-plan-act framework. The results of simulated experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm when compared to existing velocity obstacle based approaches.

How We Talk with Robots: Eliciting Minimally-Constrained Speech to Build Natural Language Interfaces and Capabilities

Industry, military, and academia are showing increasing interest in collaborative human-robot teaming in a variety of task contexts. Designing effective user interfaces for human-robot interaction is an ongoing challenge, and a variety of single and multiple-modality interfaces have been explored. Our work is to develop a bi-directional natural language interface for remote human-robot collaboration in physically situated tasks. When combined with a visual interface and audio cueing, we intend for the natural language interface to provide a naturalistic user experience that requires little training. Building the language portion of this interface requires first understanding how potential users would speak to the robot. In this paper, we describe our elicitation of minimally-constrained robot-directed language, observations about the users’ language behavior, and future directions for constructing an automated robotic system that can accommodate these language needs.