Preference-driven demonstrations ranking for inverse reinforcement learning

New flexible teaching methods for robotics are needed to automate repetitive tasks that are currently still done by humans. For limited batch sizes, it is too expensive to teach a robot a new task (Smith & Anderson, 2014). Ideally, such flexible robots can be taught a new task by a non-expert. A non-expert is a person who knows the task the...

Conveying information through non-verbal communication in robotics

Robots are becoming more and more involved in our daily life. In order to increase the acceptance of modern robotics in society even further, quite some improvements in human-robot interaction have to be made. Non-verbal communication is one such way of conveying information between robots and humans. In spite of its great potential, the current...

Online Interaction-Based Property Estimation of Objects

The goal of this thesis is to develop online model-based parameter estimation techniques for robotics towards extracting geometrical or physical properties of an unknown (or partially unknown) dynamic environment through a tactile interaction with it. The thesis focuses on a one-dimensional case of a rigid movable object, not yet studied in the...

Transportation of Cable Suspended Load using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Real-time Model Predictive Control approach

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) have received an increasing amount of attention recently with many applications being actively investigated across the globe, and several related open research questions being actively pursued. Possible applications include search and rescue, disaster relief, environmental monitoring and surveillance,...

Cooperative Sequential Composition Control for Compliant Manipulation: An Approach via "Robot Contact Language"

A convoluted manipulation task involves extensive planning and the use of a supervisory controller to execute the desired task. One controller specification is generally unsuitable to perform the complete manipulation task. Manipulation involves contact of the object being manipulated with robots, surfaces and other objects in the scenario. The...

Gaining by forgetting: Towards long-term mobile robot autonomy in large scale environments using a novel hybrid metric-topological mapping system

The emerging of mobile robots in everyday life scenarios, such as in the case of domestic care robots, is highly anticipated. Much research has been carried out to make robots more capable of performing tasks in our everyday environments. Despite major progress over the last decades, many hurdles are still to be taken. In the field of robotic...

Face Recognition for Cognitive Robots

In the near future the elderly population will increase in size up to a point that there are not enough people to provide support. One solution would be developing service robots, that can perform household tasks and in that way allow elderly to live longer independently. These service robots have to be able to adapt to changing environments,...