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We spent some time thinking about how to build some recent advances in neural natural language understanding into a system that could be useful for a general-purpose service robot. The approach strike a nice balance between flexibility, performance, and ease of implementation. I’ll present the paper at this year’s RoboCup Symposium in Australia.

Yuqian and I also put down some of thoughts on what the desirable features of a GPSR planning system are, a nice complement to our other work to appear at ICAPS.

Yuqian and I will have a paper at ICAPS on “Open World Planning for Service Robots,” the first conference publication to come from UT Austin’s RoboCup@Home team! We describe how we make plans for user commands that involve references to objects that the robot hasn’t seen recently.

Jesse’s work on improving a robot’s semantic parser through interaction was accepted at ICRA 2019. It’s the most complete description of how to build a continually improving robot language understanding system to date.

We put down some of our thoughts after more than a year of thinking about RoboCup@Home. LAAIR gives the outline of how we’ve put together a general purpose reasoning system and more conventional robotics components to address the challenge of building a general-purpose service robot. The second argues that there are synergies in domestic and office service robotics research efforts, and highlights what the @Home competition has to offer for researchers interested in service robots.

I’m excited to be joining a great group.

I’m excited to meet my new peers.

I’m excited for new robots.

I’m excited to live in a beautiful city in a beautiful state.

I’m excited to be go listen to the Seattle Symphony.

I’m excited to be one of the first to experience a beautiful new building.

I was fortunate to get to work with UT Austin Villa one more time for my last summer in Texas. Yuqian Jiang, Justin Hart and I spent quite some time putting a poster together describing the team’s research direction, and I am grateful that the team let me present it in Montreal.