Autonomous Intelligent Machines & Systems

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Research Context and Potential ImpactService robots can revolutionize how entire service-oriented domains work, with potential applicationsincluding autonomous maintenance in - often remote - industrial facilities [1, 2], such as oil rigs [3], orcare robots in domestic environments [4, 5, 6].To complete tasks effectively, robots use observations from the environment to construct and executea suitable plan. For this to be scalable, the robot must be able to generalize to any task that it mayencounter. While methods exist for generalizing manipulation skills for a particular class of task [7] (forexample, opening drawers with different geometries), this problem becomes far more challenging whendifferent tasks have fundamentally different completion conditions and require different manipulationstrategies (for example, pressing a button versus tightening a valve). There would be significant valuein a robot system that can, given a minimal, semantic description of a previously unseen task (eg 'twistthe valve until tight'), autonomously understand and generate the sequence of steps needed to completethat task and synthesize a manipulation strategy accordingly.Aims and ObjectivesThe project will investigate algorithmic and learning-based synthesis of manipulation strategies that enable a robot to generalize to new manipulation tasks with minimal human input. This includes synthesisfrom semantic, conceptual descriptions of the task written in natural or formal language. Ideally, thesewould be descriptions of what constitutes task success (for example, the valve being tight) rather thanhow to actually accomplish the task; this is for the robot to figure out.Alignment to EPSRC Strategies and Research AreasThis project directly relates to the Robotics1 and AI2 EPSRC research areas.Involvement of Companies or CollaboratorsWe plan to collaborate with Prof. Alessandro Abate and the Oxford Control and Verification group(OXCAV) for key parts of the project, in particular the automatic synthesis of manipulation strategiesto generalize to new manipulation tasks.