These are recent changes. See the Intelligent Robotics lab home page for a more complete description of our work, in several areas. See Highlights for key papers over the years.
Emily Sheetz, Misha Savchenko, Emma Zemler, Abbas Presswala,
Andrew Crouch, Shaun Azimi, and Benjamin Kuipers. 2024.
Multi-fingered end-effector grasp reflex modeling
for one-shot tactile servoing in tool manipulation tasks.
IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS-24).
Benjamin Kuipers. 2023.
AI and Society: Ethics, Trust, and Cooperation.
Communications of the ACM 66(8): 39-42, August 2023.
Paul Foster, Collin Johnson, and Benjamin Kuipers. 2023.
The Reflectance Field Map: Mapping glass and specular surfaces in dynamic environments.
IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA-23).
Benjamin Kuipers. 2022.
Trust and Cooperation.
Frontiers in Robotics and AI 9:676767, 2022.
Philip Koopman, Benjamin Kuipers, William H. Widen & Marilyn Wolf.
Ethics, Safety, and Autonomous Vehicles.
IEEE Computer, December 2021.
Jonathan E. Juett. 2021.
Towards Learning the Foundations of Manipulation Actions from Unguided Exploration.
PhD thesis, Computer Science & Engineering, University of Michigan, 2021.
Benjamin Kuipers. 2020.
Perspectives on Ethics of AI: Computer Science.
In Markus Dubber, Frank Pasquale, and Sunit Das (Eds.),
Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI,
Oxford University Press, 2020.
Chapter 22, pages 421-441.
Jonathan Juett and Benjamin Kuipers. 2019.
Learning and acting in peripersonal space: Moving, reaching, and grasping.
Frontiers in Neurorobotics 13:4, 2019.
doi: 10.3389/fnbot.2019.00004
Jonathan Juett and Benjamin Kuipers. 2018.
Learning to Grasp by Extending the Peri-Personal Space Graph.
IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2018.
Benjamin Kuipers.
How can we trust a robot?.
Communications of the ACM, 61(3): 86-95, March 2018.
Collin Johnson and Benjamin Kuipers.
Socially-aware navigation using topological maps and social norm learning.
AAAI/ACM Conf. on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES), 2018.
Collin E. Johnson. 2018.
Topological Mapping and Navigation in Real-World Environments.
PhD thesis, Computer Science & Engineering, University of Michigan, 2018.
Emanuelle Burton, Judy Goldsmith, Sven Koenig, Benjamin Kuipers, Nicholas Mattei, Toby Walsh.
Ethical considerations in artificial intelligence courses.
AI Magazine, Summer 2017.
Benjamin Kuipers, Edward A. Feigenbaum, Peter E. Hart, Nils J. Nilsson.
Shakey: From conception to history.
AI Magazine, Spring 2017.
Tom Williams, Collin Johnson, Matthias Scheutz and Benjamin Kuipers. 2017.
A tale of two architectures: A dual-citizenship integration of natural language and the cognitive map.
Int. Conf. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS), 2017.
Jong Jin Park, Seungwon Lee and Benjamin Kuipers. 2017.
Discrete-time dynamic modeling and calibration of differential-drive mobile robots with friction.
IEEE Int. Conf. Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2017.
Benjamin Kuipers. 2016.
Why and how should robots behave ethically?
RoboPhilosophy 2016 // TRANSOR 2016, Aarhus, Denmark.
Jonathan Juett and Benjamin Kuipers. 2016.
Learning to reach by building a representation of peri-personal space.
IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. Humanoid Robots, 2016.
Benjamin Kuipers. 2016.
Human-like morality and ethics for robots.
AAAI-16 Workshop on AI, Ethics & Society, 2016.
Benjamin Kuipers. 2016.
Toward morality and ethics for robots.
AAAI Spring Symposium on Ethical and Moral Considerations in Non-Human Agents (EMCAI 2016), 2016.
Jong Jin Park. 2016.
Graceful Navigation for Mobile Robots
in Dynamic and Uncertain Environments.
PhD thesis, Mechanical Engineering Department, University of Michigan, 2016.
Jong Jin Park and Benjamin Kuipers. 2015.
Feedback motion planning via non-holonomic RRT* for mobile robots.
IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2015.
Grace Tsai. 2014.
On-line, incremental visual scene understanding
for an indoor navigating robot.
Doctoral dissertation,
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,
University of Michigan.
Grace Tsai and Benjamin Kuipers. 2014.
Handling perceptual clutter for robot vision with partial model-based interpretations.
IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2014.
Grace Tsai, Collin Johnson, and Benjamin Kuipers. 2014.
Semantic visual understanding of indoor environments: from structures to opportunities for action.
Vision Meets Cognition Workshop (CVPR), 2014.
R. Mittelman, M. Sun, B. Kuipers and S. Savarese. 2014.
A Bayesian generative model for learning semantic hierarchies.
Frontiers in Psychology: Hypothesis and Theory
5(417): 1-9, May 2014.
R. Mittelman, B. Kuipers, S. Savarese and H. Lee. 2014.
Structured Recurrent Temporal Restricted Boltzmann Machines.
Int. Conf. on Machine Learning (ICML).
Grace Tsai and Benjamin Kuipers. 2013.
Focusing attention on visual features that matter.
British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), 2013.
R. Mittelman, M. Sun, B. Kuipers and S. Savarese. 2013.
Learning hierarchical linguistic descriptions of visual datasets.
2013 Conf. North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT).
R. Mittelman, H. Lee, B. Kuipers and S. Savarese. 2013.
Weakly supervised learning of mid-level features with Beta-Bernoulli process restricted Boltzmann machines.
IEEE Int. Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).
Paul Foster, Zhenghong Sun, Jong Jin Park and Benjamin Kuipers. 2013.
VisAGGE: Visible Angle Grid for Glass Environments - LIDAR mapping for glass, metal, mirrors, and other non-diffuse surfaces.
IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA-13).
Jong Jin Park and Benjamin Kuipers. 2013.
Autonomous person pacing and following with
Model Predictive Equilibrium Point Control.
IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA-13).
Changhai Xu, Jingen Liu and Benjamin Kuipers. 2012.
Moving object segmentation using motor signals.
European Conf. on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2012.
Grace Tsai and Benjamin Kuipers. 2012.
Dynamic visual understanding of the local environment
for an indoor navigating robot.
IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2012.
Jong Jin Park, Collin Johnson, and Benjamin Kuipers. 2012.
Robot Navigation with Model Predictive Equilibrium Point Control.
IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2012.
Collin Johnson and Benjamin Kuipers. 2012.
Efficient search for correct and useful topological maps.
IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2012.
Benjamin Kuipers. 2012. An existing, ecologically-successful genus of collectively intelligent artificial creatures. Collective Intelligence (CI-2012).
Changhai Xu. 2011.
Steps Towards the Object Semantic Hierarchy
Doctoral dissertation, Computer Science Department,
University of Texas at Austin.
Shilpa Gulati. 2011.
A Framework for Characterization and Planning of Safe, Comfortable, and
Customizable Motion of Assistive Mobile Robots
Doctoral dissertation, Mechanical Engineering Department,
University of Texas at Austin.
Grace Tsai, Changhai Xu, Jingen Liu and Benjamin Kuipers. 2011.
Real-time indoor scene understanding
using Bayesian filtering with motion cues.
Int. Conf. on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2011.
Jonathan Mugan and Benjamin Kuipers. 2012.
Autonomous learning of high-level states and
actions in continuous environments.
IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development 4(1): 70-86, 2012.
Jeremy Stober, Risto Miikkulainen and Benjamin Kuipers. 2011.
Learning geometry from sensorimotor experience.
Proceedings of the First Joint Conference on Development and Learning
and Epigenetic Robotics.
Jingen Liu, Benjamin Kuipers and Silvio Savarese. 2011.
Recognizing human actions by attributes.
IEEE Conf. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR-11).
Jingen Liu, Mubarak Shah, Benjamin Kuipers and Silvio Savarese. 2011.
Cross-view action recognition via view knowledge transfer.
IEEE Conf. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR-11).
Changhai Xu, Jingen Liu and Benjamin Kuipers. 2011.
Motion segmentation by learning homography matrices
from motor signals.
Canadian Conference on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV-11).
Winner: Best Student Paper Award
Changhai Xu and Benjamin Kuipers. 2011.
Object detection using principal contour fragments.
Canadian Conference on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV-11).
Jong Jin Park and Benjamin Kuipers. 2011.
A smooth control law for graceful motion of differential wheeled
mobile robots in 2D environments.
IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA-11).
Changhai Xu and Benjamin Kuipers. 2010.
Towards the Object Semantic Hierarchy.
Ninth IEEE Int. Conf. on Development and Learning (ICDL-10).
Jonathan Mugan. 2010. Autonomous Qualitative Learning of Distinctions and Actions in a Developing Agent. Doctoral dissertation, Computer Science Department, The University of Texas at Austin.
Jonathan's video describing QLAP won the Best Educational Video award at the 2010 AAAI Video Competition.
Patrick Beeson, Joseph Modayil, Benjamin Kuipers.
Factoring the mapping problem: Mobile robot map-building in the
Hybrid Spatial Semantic Hierarchy
International Journal of Robotics Research 29(4): 428-459, 2010.
Jonathan Mugan and Benjamin Kuipers. 2009.
A comparison of strategies for developmental
action acquisition in QLAP.
International Conference on Epigenetic Robotics (EpiRob-09).
Jeremy Stober, Lewis Fishgold and Benjamin Kuipers. 2009.
Learning the sensorimotor structure of the foveated retina.
International Conference on Epigenetic Robotics (EpiRob-09).
Jeremy Stober, Lewis Fishgold and Benjamin Kuipers. 2009.
Sensor map discovery for developing robots.
Manifold Learning and its Applications, AAAI Fall Symposium Series.
Changhai Xu and Benjamin Kuipers. 2009.
Construction of the Object Semantic Hierarchy.
Fifth International Cognitive Vision Workshop (ICVW-09).
Changhai Xu, Benjamin Kuipers, and Aniket Murarka. 2009.
3D pose estimation for planes.
ICCV Workshop on 3D Representation for Recognition (3dRR-09).
Aniket Murarka. 2009.
Building Safety Maps using Vision for Safe Local Mobile Robot Navigation
Doctoral dissertation, Computer Sciences Department, The University
of Texas at Austin.
S. Gulati, C. Jhurani, B. Kuipers and R. Longoria. 2009.
A framework for
planning comfortable and customizable motion of an assistive mobile robot.
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and
Systems (IROS-09).
A. Murarka and B. Kuipers. 2009.
A stereo vision based mapping algorithm for detecting inclines,
drop-offs, and obstacles for safe local navigation.
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and
Systems (IROS-09).
Jonathan Mugan and Benjamin Kuipers. 2009.
Autonomously learning an action hierarchy using
a learned qualitative state representation.
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-09).
A. Murarka, M. Sridharan and B. Kuipers. 2008.
Detecting obstacles and drop-offs using stereo and motion cues for
safe local motion.
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and
Systems (IROS-08).
Jeremy Stober and Benjamin Kuipers. 2008.
From pixels to policies: a bootstrapping agent.
IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL-08).
Jonathan Mugan and Benjamin Kuipers. 2008.
Towards the application of reinforcement learning
to undirected developmental learning..
International Conference on Epigenetic Robotics (Epirob-08).
Subramanian Ramamoorthy and Benjamin J. Kuipers. 2008.
Trajectory generation for dynamic bipedal walking
through qualitative model based manifold learning.
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics
and Automation (ICRA-08).
ICRA Best Paper Award Finalist (Top 4).
Shilpa Gulati and Benjamin Kuipers. 2008.
High Performance Control for Graceful Motion of an Intelligent
Wheelchair.
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics
and Automation (ICRA-08).
Jonathan Mugan and Benjamin Kuipers. 2007.
Learning distinctions and rules in a continuous world
through active exploration..
7th International Conference on Epigenetic Robotics (Epirob-07).
Jefferson Provost and Benjamin Kuipers. 2007.
Self-organizing distinctive state abstraction using options..
7th International Conference on Epigenetic Robotics (Epirob-07).
(11-9-06) Several essays originally posted on my web site have been published in a journal.
Benjamin Kuipers. 2006.
Essays on Terrorism.
Law Enforcement Executive Forum 6(5): 189-198, 2006.
(6-8-06) Best Student Paper Award at CRV-06!
(5-21-03) The journal version of Emilio Remolina's PhD thesis has been accepted to the Artificial Intelligence Journal. This is the current definitive description of the causal and topological map representations in the SSH.
It was created by Mike Hewett in the Bioinformatics group in the Stanford Genetics Department.
(6-1-2001) The following encyclopedia article provides a compact introduction to the current state of qualitative simulation.
Let me know (kuipers@cs.utexas.edu) if there's a problem.
Our online bibliography is a better source.
Our online bibliography is a better source.
(1-8-98)
These are problems in qualitative reasoning that I consider to be particularly fruitful right now, in the sense of being both accessible and important. A good solution to any of these problems will not only be valuable in its own right, but will enable substantial further work by the researcher and by others.
I encourage anyone in the QR community to take these on. I will be happy to give email advice when I can.
Ben Kuipers
More detail under the Multi-Function Knowledge Base Research Group home page.
Tragic Loss
Bert Kay was mugged and killed in Palo Alto on Thursday,
June 12, 1997.
He was 38 years old, and leaves his wife Meg and two-year-old twin daughters, Sonia and Nina.
There was a memorial service on Tuesday, June 17, at Hakone Gardens in Saratoga, California. Several Austin-area memorials were held the following week.
Bert's web page will be extended with further information about his life and work.
Reprinted in Advances in Spatial Reasoning, Volume 2, Su-shing Chen (Ed.), Norwood NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1990.
Overall the book is extremely well written. The book assumes, and requires, a fairly strong knowledge of AI; one beyond that provided by a typical introductory undergraduate course. For those with the relevant background, or strong motivation, the book will be an excellent resource. It has been written as a textbook with thought-provoking practice and research problems at the end of each chapter. The organization of chapters is excellent, starting with a gentle introduction and then increasing in detail and complexity, while building on the material of earlier chapters. Given the significant advances and successes in the field of qualitative reasoning this book is a very timely one and I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in AI, in general, and modeling and simulation, in particular.
This book may become a very important book for Geographic Systems and for geography in general, despite the fact, that it does not discuss anything geographical or spatial in its 400 pages. ... It must be hoped that many geographers use the methods to model geographical processes and to explore the dynamic behavior of systems in physical and human geography. Many M.Sc. or Ph.D. thesis could benefit from the rigor of the method and the application of the software. Modeling of dynamic systems - a la Forrester's Urban Dynamics - become feasible, even in the absence of detailed quantitative knowledge.
Reprinted in Walter Van de Velde (ed.), Towards Learning Robots, Bradford/MIT Press, 1993.
Reprinted in Advances in Spatial Reasoning, Volume 2, Su-shing Chen (Ed.), Norwood NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1990.
A significant barrier to application of QSIM to large-scale problems is the efficiency of qualitative simulation. Recently, a group at T.U. Graz in Austria have designed and implemented a special-purpose parallel hardware architecture for qualitative simulation. See their Web page and published papers.
Reinhold Weiss, Marco Platzner, Bernhard Rinner, T.U. Graz, Austria.
Reprinted in D. S. Weld & J. de Kleer (Eds.), Readings in Qualitative Reasoning about Physical Systems, Los Altos, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 1990.
[Superceded by QR book, chapter 12.]
Reprinted in G. Shafer and J. Pearl (Eds.), Readings in Uncertain Reasoning, San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1990.
Daniel L. Dvorak. 1987. Expert systems for monitoring and control. University of Texas at Austin, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Technical Report AI 87-55.
David W. Franke. 1992. A theory of teleology. Doctoral dissertation, Computer Science Department, University of Texas at Austin, May 1992. (Available as TR AI93-201.)
Akira Hayashi, Geometrical Motion Planning for Highly Redundant Manipulators Using a Continuous Manipulator Model. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas. May 1991. (Available as TR AI91-156.)