Longitudinal Proactive Robot Assistance

Abstract

Studies show that users value proactivity in robotic assistance, but mobile manipulators today require exact task descriptions, and can proactively assist only the user's ongoing activity. Through this research project, I formulate and advance the problem of longitudinal proactive assistance, which seeks to carry out assistive actions in advance and without being asked, by understanding the human user's needs and preferences in context of the environment over long time horizons. My research aims to enable autonomous robots to utilize multimodal data from passive observations to understand routine lives of human users, and interact with the human user to communicate its reasoning and actively seek feedback.