arXiv subjects

Yigit Yildirim

Publications and source records attributed to Yigit Yildirim.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Trajectory Learning with Graph Representations for Social Robot Navigation

Autonomous mobile robots are expected to exhibit socially compliant navigation for minimizing pedestrian disturbance. While capturing social interactions and incorporating pedestrian motion estimations into decision-making are beneficial for compliance, prior methods fail to address both spatial and temporal characteristics present in real-world data. Reinforcement Learning offers high capability, but it requires hand-crafted reward functions that reduce social behavior to static criteria, limiting its ability to reproduce patterns that exist in real pedestrian behavior. Imitation Learning offers direct training from real-world data but lacks modeling of social interactions and suffers from error accumulation. To this end, we propose an imitation learning framework that leverages spatiotemporal dynamics for socially compliant navigation. To represent social context based on interactions, we introduce a graph-based auxiliary network that encodes crowd states by attending to pedestrians. In addition, we present a navigation module that captures temporal dynamics and mitigates error accumulations by incorporating encoded state predictions and employing a trajectory-level learning objective. Our framework outperforms established data-driven baselines on simulation and a real-world dataset across diverse social metrics.

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arXiv2026

Inverse Manipulation through Symbolic Planning and Residual Operator Learning

Inverting a robotic task requires more than reversing symbolic state transitions or rewinding motor trajectories. In robot manipulation tasks, symbolic inverse plans often fail to fully restore the effects of forward executions under continuous interaction dynamics. We present a hybrid framework for inverse manipulation that derives inverse-skill objectives from STRIPS-like operators automatically extracted from demonstrations through soft geometric predicates. For each extracted operator, we construct an inverse restoration objective that preserves preconditions, restores delete effects, and negates add effects. A task planner first attempts to satisfy this objective using available action primitives. Unresolved symbolic predicates then induce a residual operator learning problem solved through Reinforcement Learning (RL). We evaluate the framework on the ManiSkill3 PushCube task. For a forward pushing skill, the symbolic inverse performs a coarse pick-and-place restoration, while a residual Soft Actor-Critic policy refines the cube pose to satisfy the remaining inverse predicates. Our results show that predicate-derived residual control can turn an approximate symbolic inverse into a physically grounded inverse skill.

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arXiv2026

Neuro-Symbolic Skill Discovery for Conditional Multi-Level Planning

This paper proposes a novel learning architecture for acquiring generalizable high-level symbolic skills from a few unlabeled low-level skill trajectory demonstrations. The architecture involves neural networks for symbol discovery and low-level controller acquisition and a multi-level planning pipeline that utilizes the discovered symbols and the learned low-level controllers. The discovered action symbols are automatically interpreted using visual language models that are also responsible for generating high-level plans. While extracting high-level symbols, our model preserves the low-level information so that low-level action planning can be carried out by using gradient-based planning. To assess the efficacy of our method, we tested the high and low-level planning performance of our architecture by using simulated and real-world experiments across various tasks. The experiments have shown that our method is able to manipulate objects in unseen locations and plan and execute long-horizon tasks by using novel action sequences, even in highly cluttered environments when cued by only a few demonstrations that cover small regions of the environment.

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arXiv2025

RAMPA: Robotic Augmented Reality for Machine Programming by DemonstrAtion

This paper introduces Robotic Augmented Reality for Machine Programming by Demonstration (RAMPA), the first ML-integrated, XR-driven end-to-end robotic system, allowing training and deployment of ML models such as ProMPs on the fly, and utilizing the capabilities of state-of-the-art and commercially available AR headsets, e.g., Meta Quest 3, to facilitate the application of Programming by Demonstration (PbD) approaches on industrial robotic arms, e.g., Universal Robots UR10. Our approach enables in-situ data recording, visualization, and fine-tuning of skill demonstrations directly within the user's physical environment. RAMPA addresses critical challenges of PbD, such as safety concerns, programming barriers, and the inefficiency of collecting demonstrations on the actual hardware. The performance of our system is evaluated against the traditional method of kinesthetic control in teaching three different robotic manipulation tasks and analyzed with quantitative metrics, measuring task performance and completion time, trajectory smoothness, system usability, user experience, and task load using standardized surveys. Our findings indicate a substantial advancement in how robotic tasks are taught and refined, promising improvements in operational safety, efficiency, and user engagement in robotic programming.

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arXiv2024

Conditional Neural Expert Processes for Learning Movement Primitives from Demonstration

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is a widely used technique for skill acquisition in robotics. However, demonstrations of the same skill may exhibit significant variances, or learning systems may attempt to acquire different means of the same skill simultaneously, making it challenging to encode these motions into movement primitives. To address these challenges, we propose an LfD framework, namely the Conditional Neural Expert Processes (CNEP), that learns to assign demonstrations from different modes to distinct expert networks utilizing the inherent information within the latent space to match experts with the encoded representations. CNEP does not require supervision on which mode the trajectories belong to. We compare the performance of CNEP against widely used and powerful LfD methods such as Gaussian Mixture Models, Probabilistic Movement Primitives, and Stable Movement Primitives and show that our method outperforms these baselines on multimodal trajectory datasets. The results reveal enhanced modeling performance for movement primitives, leading to the synthesis of trajectories that more accurately reflect those demonstrated by experts, particularly when the skill demonstrations include intersection points from various trajectories. We evaluated the CNEP model on two real-robot tasks, namely obstacle avoidance and pick-and-place tasks, that require the robot to learn multi-modal motion trajectories and execute the correct primitives given target environment conditions. We also showed that our system is capable of on-the-fly adaptation to environmental changes via an online conditioning mechanism. Lastly, we believe that CNEP offers improved explainability and interpretability by autonomously finding discrete behavior primitives and providing probability values about its expert selection decisions.

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arXiv2024

Bidirectional Human Interactive AI Framework for Social Robot Navigation

Trustworthiness is a crucial concept in the context of human-robot interaction. Cooperative robots must be transparent regarding their decision-making process, especially when operating in a human-oriented environment. This paper presents a comprehensive end-to-end framework aimed at fostering trustworthy bidirectional human-robot interaction in collaborative environments for the social navigation of mobile robots. In this framework, the robot communicates verbally while the human guides with gestures. Our method enables a mobile robot to predict the trajectory of people and adjust its route in a socially-aware manner. In case of conflict between human and robot decisions, detected through visual examination, the route is dynamically modified based on human preference while verbal communication is maintained. We present our pipeline, framework design, and preliminary experiments that form the foundation of our proposition.

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arXiv2024

Learning Early Social Maneuvers for Enhanced Social Navigation

Socially compliant navigation is an integral part of safety features in Human-Robot Interaction. Traditional approaches to mobile navigation prioritize physical aspects, such as efficiency, but social behaviors gain traction as robots appear more in daily life. Recent techniques to improve the social compliance of navigation often rely on predefined features or reward functions, introducing assumptions about social human behavior. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Learning from Demonstration (LfD) framework for social navigation that exclusively utilizes raw sensory data. Additionally, the proposed system contains mechanisms to consider the future paths of the surrounding pedestrians, acknowledging the temporal aspect of the problem. The final product is expected to reduce the anxiety of people sharing their environment with a mobile robot, helping them trust that the robot is aware of their presence and will not harm them. As the framework is currently being developed, we outline its components, present experimental results, and discuss future work towards realizing this framework.

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arXiv2024

Learning Social Navigation from Demonstrations with Deep Neural Networks

Traditional path-planning techniques treat humans as obstacles. This has changed since robots started to enter human environments. On modern robots, social navigation has become an important aspect of navigation systems. To use learning-based techniques to achieve social navigation, a powerful framework that is capable of representing complex functions with as few data as possible is required. In this study, we benefited from recent advances in deep learning at both global and local planning levels to achieve human-aware navigation on a simulated robot. Two distinct deep models are trained with respective objectives: one for global planning and one for local planning. These models are then employed in the simulated robot. In the end, it has been shown that our model can successfully carry out both global and local planning tasks. We have shown that our system could generate paths that successfully reach targets while avoiding obstacles with better performance compared to feed-forward neural networks.

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arXiv2022

Learning Social Navigation from Demonstrations with Conditional Neural Processes

Sociability is essential for modern robots to increase their acceptability in human environments. Traditional techniques use manually engineered utility functions inspired by observing pedestrian behaviors to achieve social navigation. However, social aspects of navigation are diverse, changing across different types of environments, societies, and population densities, making it unrealistic to use hand-crafted techniques in each domain. This paper presents a data-driven navigation architecture that uses state-of-the-art neural architectures, namely Conditional Neural Processes, to learn global and local controllers of the mobile robot from observations. Additionally, we leverage a state-of-the-art, deep prediction mechanism to detect situations not similar to the trained ones, where reactive controllers step in to ensure safe navigation. Our results demonstrate that the proposed framework can successfully carry out navigation tasks regarding social norms in the data. Further, we showed that our system produces fewer personal-zone violations, causing less discomfort.

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