Rohan Banerjee

Rohan Banerjee, Krishna Palempalli, Bohan Yang et al.

Robots operating in unstructured human environments inevitably encounter failures, especially in robot caregiving scenarios. While humans can often help robots recover, excessive or poorly targeted queries impose unnecessary cognitive and physical workload on the human partner. We present a human-in-the-loop failure-recovery framework for modular robotic policies, where a policy is composed of distinct modules such as perception, planning, and control, any of which may fail and often require different forms of human feedback. Our framework integrates calibrated estimates of module-level uncertainty with models of human intervention cost to decide which module to query and when to query the human. It separates these two decisions: a module selector identifies the module most likely responsible for failure, and a querying algorithm determines whether to solicit human input or act autonomously. We evaluate several module-selection strategies and querying algorithms in controlled synthetic experiments, revealing trade-offs between recovery efficiency, robustness to system and user variables, and user workload. Finally, we deploy the framework on a robot-assisted bite acquisition system and demonstrate, in studies involving individuals with both emulated and real mobility limitations, that it improves recovery success while reducing the workload imposed on users. Our results highlight how explicitly reasoning about both robot uncertainty and human effort can enable more efficient and user-centered failure recovery in collaborative robots. Supplementary materials and videos can be found at: http://emprise.cs.cornell.edu/modularhil

Rohan Banerjee, Prishita Ray, Mark Campbell

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have been broadly applied to a large number of robotics tasks, such as robot manipulation and autonomous driving. However, an open problem in deep RL is learning policies that are robust to variations in the environment, which is an important condition for such systems to be deployed into real-world, unstructured settings. Curriculum learning is one approach that has been applied to improve generalization performance in both supervised and reinforcement learning domains, but selecting the appropriate curriculum to achieve robustness can be a user-intensive process. In our work, we show that performing probabilistic inference of the underlying curriculum-reward function using Bayesian Optimization can be a promising technique for finding a robust curriculum. We demonstrate that a curriculum found with Bayesian optimization can outperform a vanilla deep RL agent and a hand-engineered curriculum in the domain of autonomous racing with obstacle avoidance. Our code is available at https://github.com/PRISHIta123/Curriculum_RL_for_Driving.

Rishabh Madan, Jiawei Lin, Mahika Goel et al.

Physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) requires robots to adapt to individual contact preferences, such as where and how much force is applied. Identifying preferences is difficult for a single contact; with whole-arm interaction involving multiple simultaneous contacts between the robot and human, the challenge is greater because different body parts can impose incompatible force requirements. In caregiving tasks, where contact is frequent and varied, such conflicts are unavoidable. With multiple preferences across multiple contacts, no single solution can satisfy all objectives--trade-offs are inherent, making prioritization essential. We present PrioriTouch, a framework for ranking and executing control objectives across multiple contacts. PrioriTouch can prioritize from a general collection of controllers, making it applicable not only to caregiving scenarios such as bed bathing and dressing but also to broader multi-contact settings. Our method combines a novel learning-to-rank approach with hierarchical operational space control, leveraging simulation-in-the-loop rollouts for data-efficient and safe exploration. We conduct a user study on physical assistance preferences, derive personalized comfort thresholds, and incorporate them into PrioriTouch. We evaluate PrioriTouch through extensive simulation and real-world experiments, demonstrating its ability to adapt to user contact preferences, maintain task performance, and enhance safety and comfort. Website: https://emprise.cs.cornell.edu/prioritouch.