Abstract: Physically collaborative robots present an opportunity to positively impact society across many domains. However, robots currently lack the ability to infer how their actions physically affect people. This is especially true for robotic caregiving tasks that involve manipulating deformable cloth around the human body, such as dressing and bathing assistance. In this talk, I will introduce haptic perspective-taking—the act of predicting a person’s haptic sense of touch during physical contact. We will discuss robot learning methods for haptic perspective-taking that leverage vision and haptic data. These methods aim to enable a robot to perform decision-making according to how their actions would apply pressure onto the human body. We will also explore generalizing this concept of haptic perspective-taking to scenarios where cloth interacts with everyday objects other than the human body.

Brief Biosketch: Zackory Erickson is an Assistant Professor in The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where he leads the Robotic Caregiving and Human Interaction (RCHI) Lab. His research focuses on developing new computational, control, and sensing methods for intelligent physical human-robot interaction and healthcare robots. Zackory received his PhD in Robotics and M.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and B.S. in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse