Jan-Gerrit Habekost

Jan-Gerrit Habekost, Erik Strahl, Philipp Allgeuer et al.

The paper introduces CycleIK, a neuro-robotic approach that wraps two novel neuro-inspired methods for the inverse kinematics (IK) task, a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), and a Multi-Layer Perceptron architecture. These methods can be used in a standalone fashion, but we also show how embedding these into a hybrid neuro-genetic IK pipeline allows for further optimization via sequential least-squares programming (SLSQP) or a genetic algorithm (GA). The models are trained and tested on dense datasets that were collected from random robot configurations of the new Neuro-Inspired COLlaborator (NICOL), a semi-humanoid robot with two redundant 8-DoF manipulators. We utilize the weighted multi-objective function from the state-of-the-art BioIK method to support the training process and our hybrid neuro-genetic architecture. We show that the neural models can compete with state-of-the-art IK approaches, which allows for deployment directly to robotic hardware. Additionally, it is shown that the incorporation of the genetic algorithm improves the precision while simultaneously reducing the overall runtime.

Martin Gromniak, Jan-Gerrit Habekost, Sebastian Kamp et al.

We introduce a Generalizable Neural Radiance Field approach for predicting 3D workspace occupancy from egocentric robot observations. Unlike prior methods operating in camera-centric coordinates, our model constructs occupancy representations in a global workspace frame, making it directly applicable to robotic manipulation. The model integrates flexible source views and generalizes to unseen object arrangements without scene-specific finetuning. We demonstrate the approach on a humanoid robot and evaluate predicted geometry against 3D sensor ground truth. Trained on 40 real scenes, our model achieves 26mm reconstruction error, including occluded regions, validating its ability to infer complete 3D occupancy beyond traditional stereo vision methods.

Thomas Vitry, Vanessa Maeder, Kieran Edgeworth et al.

Robot initiative is a central challenge in multi-party human-robot collaboration. A robot that contributes without being addressed may provide timely support, but it may also disrupt coordination, divide attention, or interrupt turn-taking; a robot that waits to be addressed may preserve human control, but it may also miss opportunities to assist. We investigate this design challenge in a collaborative escape room in which pairs of participants work with a humanoid robot under either a reactive interaction model, where the robot responds only when addressed, or a proactive model, where it listens continuously, contributes autonomously, and periodically re-initiates interaction. We evaluate both models using puzzle-solving performance, interaction frequency, and participant ratings on the Godspeed and RoSAS scales. The proactive model substantially increases interaction frequency, whereas the reactive model shows a descriptively higher overall success rate (92.86% vs. 71.42%). The strongest differences emerge when prior experience and personality are taken into account: participants with LLM experience solve the early puzzles faster in the reactive condition, and participants with prior robot experience show modified evaluations of proactive and reactive interaction as do introverted participants. These findings demonstrate that the effects of robot initiative are simultaneously shaped by users' prior experience, personality traits and more generally by the needs of the group.

Philipp Allgeuer, Jan-Gerrit Habekost, Stefan Wermter

Robots operating in real-world environments must in general be able to recognize previously unseen objects. As robotic systems move toward open-world autonomy, there is a growing, yet largely unmet, need for open vocabulary object detectors that are prompt-free and efficient enough for continuous deployment. We present AnomNOVIC, a two-stage known-workspace framework that combines a masked autoencoder (MAE) trained for anomaly detection, with NOVIC, a powerful real-time prompt-free open vocabulary image classifier. The MAE produces generic object-agnostic bounding boxes, allowing NOVIC to classify salient image regions without requiring a predefined candidate class list. We evaluate AnomNOVIC against strong open vocabulary baselines in a tabletop robot-object environment featuring the NICOL humanoid robot, reaching 47.1% AP / 57.5% AP50 for prompt-free recognition, and 59.0% AP / 72.5% AP50 if class candidates are provided. Across additional datasets, including an in-the-wild test set with 48 unique objects, AnomNOVIC reaches up to 82.6% prompt-free detection and classification accuracy. These results significantly surpass all tested open vocabulary baselines, including YOLO-World-v2, OWLv2, and YOLOE.

Jan-Gerrit Habekost, Connor Gäde, Philipp Allgeuer et al.

This paper introduces a novel zero-shot motion planning method that allows users to quickly design smooth robot motions in Cartesian space. A Bézier curve-based Cartesian plan is transformed into a joint space trajectory by our neuro-inspired inverse kinematics (IK) method CycleIK, for which we enable platform independence by scaling it to arbitrary robot designs. The motion planner is evaluated on the physical hardware of the two humanoid robots NICO and NICOL in a human-in-the-loop grasping scenario. Our method is deployed with an embodied agent that is a large language model (LLM) at its core. We generalize the embodied agent, that was introduced for NICOL, to also embody NICO. The agent can execute a discrete set of physical actions and allows the user to verbally instruct various different robots. We contribute a grasping primitive to its action space that allows for precise manipulation of household objects. The updated CycleIK method is compared to popular numerical IK solvers and state-of-the-art neural IK methods in simulation and is shown to be competitive with or outperform all evaluated methods when the algorithm runtime is very short. The grasping primitive is evaluated on both NICOL and NICO robots with a reported grasp success of 72% to 82% for each robot, respectively.

Ferran Gebellí, Anaís Garrell, Jan-Gerrit Habekost et al.

In the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), a fundamental challenge is to facilitate human understanding of robots. The emerging domain of eXplainable HRI (XHRI) investigates methods to generate explanations and evaluate their impact on human-robot interactions. Previous works have highlighted the need to personalise the level of detail of these explanations to enhance usability and comprehension. Our paper presents a framework designed to update and retrieve user knowledge-memory models, allowing for adapting the explanations' level of detail while referencing previously acquired concepts. Three architectures based on our proposed framework that use Large Language Models (LLMs) are evaluated in two distinct scenarios: a hospital patrolling robot and a kitchen assistant robot. Experimental results demonstrate that a two-stage architecture, which first generates an explanation and then personalises it, is the framework architecture that effectively reduces the level of detail only when there is related user knowledge.

Lukáš Gajdošech, Hassan Ali, Jan-Gerrit Habekost et al.

Datasets for object detection often do not account for enough variety of glasses, due to their transparent and reflective properties. Specifically, open-vocabulary object detectors, widely used in embodied robotic agents, fail to distinguish subclasses of glasses. This scientific gap poses an issue for robotic applications that suffer from accumulating errors between detection, planning, and action execution. This paper introduces a novel method for acquiring real-world data from RGB-D sensors that minimizes human effort. We propose an auto-labeling pipeline that generates labels for all the acquired frames based on the depth measurements. We provide a novel real-world glass object dataset GlassNICOLDataset that was collected on the Neuro-Inspired COLlaborator (NICOL), a humanoid robot platform. The dataset consists of 7850 images recorded from five different cameras. We show that our trained baseline model outperforms state-of-the-art open-vocabulary approaches. In addition, we deploy our baseline model in an embodied agent approach to the NICOL platform, on which it achieves a success rate of 81% in a human-robot bartending scenario.