Improving Naturalness and Intelligibility of Text-to-Speech Systems
The latest generation of speech synthesis techniques has recently increased the quality of Text-To-Speech (TTS) systems as regarding the naturalness and the intelligibility of the voice. Such systems are often referred in the literature as corpus-based TTS. The unit-selection method is one of the technologies for corpus-based TTS that accumulates human speech (natural speech) in a database of reusable units, and generates synthesized speech by properly concatenating the units
Efficient Human-like Dexterous Grasping under Uncertainty for Robotics
Imagine that you are reaching into the fridge to grasp an object you can only partially see. Rather than relying solely on vision, you must use touch in order to localise it and securely grasp it. However, humans would not poke the object to localise it first and then grasp it. We compensate for the uncertainty by approaching the object in a way such that if a contact occurs it will generate enough information about where the object is and the object will be grasped with a mi
Let's Push Things Forwards
As robots make their way out of factories to work alongside humans, it is crucial that they develop the necessary skills to manipulate and interact with their environment in various and unforeseeable circumstances. Pushing, with this regards, becomes a key primitive manipulation skill for a robot's repertoire. Imagine a humanoid robot designate to assist elders in their houses, tasked to fetch a medicine from the top shelf. Instead of picking up each object that obstructs the
'Feature-Based Transfer Learning for Robotic Push Manipulation'
Our paper entitled 'Feature-Based Transfer Learning for Robotic Push Manipulation' published in 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) has been selected for an extended version by the Special Issue on Advancement in Engineering and Computer Science organized by Advances in Science, Technology and Engineering Systems Journal (ASTESJ) Thanks to my students, Rhys Howard and Jochen Stuber, the extended paper also proposed a improvement of a twofold i
Selected finalist for the Best Student Paper award at ICORR 2019
The 16th IEEE/RAS-EMBS International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics (ICORR 2019) [Toronto, Canada, June 24–28] is a bi-annual appointment on theoretical and experimental issues in the fields of Rehabilitation Robotics and Neuroscience applied to Healthcare. Prosthetic, assistive, diagnostic, and therapeutic robots continue to face challenges of adoption by the users. Karoline Heiwolt, a CNCR student, has developed under my supervision a novel approach to make myocontro
Towards Robots that We can Trust
As robots make their way into our homes, the ability to predict how their actions affect the environment is a key skill that they need to possess to operate in safety and gain our trust. In this work, we review the robotic pushing literature. While focusing on work concerned with predicting the motion of pushed objects, we also cover relevant applications of pushing for planning and control. This paper is concerned with the evolution of forwards models (FMs) and their applica
Birmingham researchers use artificial intelligence to advance the dexterity of robots
Link to the article about our GPAtlasRRT algorithm for tactile recovering of the shape of novel objects. https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/university/colleges/eps/news/2018/7/birmingham-researchers-artificial-intelligence-advance-dexterity-robots.aspx #rrt #gp #atlas #robotics #robot #tactile #exploration #touch #novelobjects #vito #boris #softhand #humanoid #ai #artificialintelligence #dexterity #universityofbirmingham #irlab #uob #pisa
2D Linear Time-Variant Controller for Human's Intention Detection for Reach-to-Grasp Trajectorie
Designing robotic assistance devices for manipulation tasks is challenging. This work is concerned with improving accuracy and usability of semi-autonomous robots, such as human operated manipulators or exoskeletons. The key insight is to develop a system that takes into account context- and user-awareness to take better decisions in how to assist the user. The context-awareness is implemented by enabling the system to automatically generate a set of candidate grasps and reac
