Seminar from Dr. Rohan Paleja, Technical Staff Researcher Artificial Intelligence Group, MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

Collaborative robots and machine-learning-based virtual agents are increasingly entering the human workspace with the aim of increasing productivity, enhancing safety, and improving the quality of our lives. These agents will dynamically interact with a wide variety of people in dynamic and novel contexts, increasing the prevalence of human-machine teams in applications spanning from healthcare and manufacturing to household assistance. My research aims to create transparent systems that can support users and interact with humans, pushing the frontier of real-world robotics systems towards those that understand human behavior, maintain interpretability, communicate efficiently, and coordinate with high performance. In this talk, I will cover a set of works that enable robots to 1) coordinate well with other agents utilizing simulated experience and communication, 2) understand and learn from diverse human users, 3) learn interpretable, human-readable tree-based control policies directly via reinforcement learning, and 4) provide users with information online to improve situational awareness and facilitate effective human-robot collaboration.