Dr. Crick's Lab
Robotic Cognition Laboratory
About the Lab
The Robotic Cognition Laboratory is devoted to two overarching, complementary goals: to ground models of developmental psychology and cognitive science in realized, embodied computational systems; and to use models of human cognition and social development to improve robot control and learning, human-robot interaction and artificial intelligence.
Learning from negotiation. Traditional learning from demonstration develops policies which can never be better than those demonstrated by human teachers. However, humans are not especially good at describing or implementing optimal behaviors. Demonstrations can bootstrap computational searches of policy spaces, while ongoing human interaction refines and directs the search process.
Shared autonomy. Humans and robots should be able to work together in flexible teams at varying levels of autonomy and interaction. We are developing a coordination framework for human-robot teams which will allow humans to supply direction and decisionmaking at whatever level of detail is possible and appropriate. Robots can act autonomously when there are insufficient human decisionmaking resources available, and will cooperate with one another to share information and reasonable courses of action.
Professional Activities
- Associate Editor, IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN)
- Program Committee:
- Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
- International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)
- Robotics Science and Systems (RSS)
- Reviewer:
- IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and on Epigenetic Robotics
- Computational Intelligence
- Topics in Cognitive Science
- Journal of Human-Robot Interaction
- IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development
- International Journal of Social Robotics
- IEEE RAS/EMBS International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics
- Robotics Science and Systems (RSS)
- ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)
- Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
- American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
- IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robotics
- International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL)
- IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering
- IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
- ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks
- IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
- Member of:
- The Cognitive Science Society
- Association for Computing Machinery
- The American Association for the Advancement of Science