Robots Dress Humans Without The Full Picture - AI Summary

"Much harder are tasks that require situational awareness, involving almost instantaneous adaptations to changing circumstances in the environment," explains Theodoros Stouraitis, a visiting scientist in the Interactive Robotics Group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). "Things become even more complicated when a robot has to interact with a human and work together to safely and successfully complete a task," adds Shen Li, a Ph.D. candidate in the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. In a new work, described in a paper that appears in an April 2022 issue of IEEE Robotics and Automation, Li, Stouraitis, Gienger, Vijayakumar, and Shah explain the headway they've made on a more demanding problem--robot-assisted dressing with sleeved clothes. While other researchers have made state estimation predictions of this sort, what distinguishes this new work is that the MIT investigators and their partners can set a clear upper limit on the uncertainty and guarantee that the elbow will be somewhere within a prescribed box. Such an algorithm could, for instance, guide a robot to recognize the intentions of its human partner as it works collaboratively to move blocks around in an orderly manner or set a dinner table.