Kourosh serves as a postdoctoral researcher as a part of the Acceleration Consortium in Robot Visionand Learning (RVL) and People, AI, & Robots (PAIR) labs at the University of Toronto. He works diligently on the integration of different AI techniques with the corpus of robots in order to enable them to naturally interact with humans and make a positive impact on humans' lives.
The research aims to introduce a new generation of human-robot collaboration (HRC) systems for complex manipulation tasks, happening every day in chemistry laboratories. For chemistry experiments, to fill the gap between currently manual manipulation and fully autonomous manipulation, robots should learn extensively from the human domain expertise. However, principal elements of human intelligence to perform a wide variety of manipulation tasks in daily life activities are yet unclear. The research hopes to transfer human intelligence for manipulation of lab equipments and materials to robots employing different AI techniques. It will enable robots toward automatically performing chemistry lab experiments. A chemistry lab workspace is intrinsically uncertain, semi-structured, might be occluded, and partially observable. One can decompose a chemistry lab experiment into two levels, at the task level (i.e., high level) where the experiment unfolds into a sequence of actions to be carried out by humans and robots, and at the motion level where skillfully an atomic manipulation action, as a part of a planned sequence of actions, should be performed by humans or robots. In order to successfully deploy robotic technologies to chemistry labs and allow for a natural, fluent, and safe human-robot collaboration, this research intends to address both task level and motion level challenges at the same time, by empowering robots to learn tasks and acquire necessary skills from human experts. We will combine different AI techniques with rich and various perceptual information to enable the next generation of robots for this purpose.
