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ROBOT TOOL BEHAVIOR: A DEVELOPMENTAL APPROACH TO AUTONOMOUS TOOL USE A Dissertation Presented to The Academic Faculty by Alexander Stoytchev In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology August 2007 Copyright c 2007 by Alexander Stoytchev ROBOT TOOL BEHAVIOR: A DEVELOPMENTAL APPROACH TO AUTONOMOUS TOOL USE Approved by: Ronald Arkin, Advisor Charles Isbell College of Computing College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology Georgia Institute of Technology Aaron Bobick Harvey Lipkin College of Computing Mechanical Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology Georgia Institute of Technology Tucker Balch College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology Date Approved: 8 June, 2007 To my late grandfather, who was a carpenter and taught me how to use the tools in his workshop when I was a child. He wanted me to become an architect. I hope that being a roboticist would have been a distant second on his list. iii PREFACE I was fortunate to stumble upon the topic of autonomous tool use in robots for my disserta- tion. When I joined the robotics lab at Georgia Tech I began to look for a good dissertation topic. For almost two years I was reading the robotics literature with that goal in mind. I enjoyed reading but the more I read the more I felt that all the good dissertation topics have already been taken. So I started reading books from other fields of science in hope of finding an inspiration. Finally, the years of reading paid off when I stumbled across Thomas Power's book entitled \Play and Exploration in Children and Animals." At first I was angry at myself for even borrowing a book from the library about children playing with toys (that's what the picture on the front cover showed). Nevertheless, I decided to browse through the pages. Several pages contained tables that compared the known object exploration strategies in animals and humans. The book also contained a reprint of Benjamin Beck's taxonomy of tool using modes in animals (see Table 2.3). It immediately struck me that the problem of autonomous tool use has not been well addressed in robotics. Within five minutes I had already decided to abandon all of my other research ideas and start working in this new direction. The more I read about this new topic the more I liked it. The more I read, however, the harder it was to figure out how to even begin to address this enormous topic. From the very beginning I was interested in the developmental aspect of tool use. One of the biggest challenges was to focus my ideas on creating a well defined developmental trajectory that the robot can take in order to learn to use tools autonomously, which is the topic of this dissertation. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS One of the main reasons why I picked robotics as my area of specialization is because it is inherently multi-disciplinary. I never expected, however, that my own research will take on a journey through so many different disciplines: ethology, anthropology, primatology, neu- roscience, psychophysics, developmental psychology, computer graphics, computer vision, dynamics, and, of course, robotics. Ultimately, it was a very satisfying experience although I have to admit that it did not always feel that way. There are many people that I would like to thank for acknowledge their support during my years as a graduate student. First of all, I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee: Ron Arkin, Aaron Bobick, Tucker Balch, Charles Isbell, and Harvey Lipkin. My advisor, Ron Arkin, deserves a special thank you for his seemingly infinite patience which I tested on many occasions. He understood the importance of the problem that I picked for my dissertation and gave me unlimited academic freedom to pursue it. At the same time, however, he kept me on my toes by asking for new experimental results and conference papers which were not always forthcoming. I appreciated Ron's dependability and was impressed by his time management skills. I knew I could always find him in his office at 6am, even on the first day he came back from sabbatical. Aaron Bobick was always a good mentor and supporter. In my discussions with him he was always one step ahead of me. He challenged me and tried to push my research in directions that would make a compelling demonstration of its potential. I also enjoyed his classes and I learned a lot from him about what it takes to be a good teacher. Tucker Balch is partially responsible for me coming to Atlanta. I got to know him even before I came to the US as he was one of the few people that took the time to reply to my ridiculously long e-mail with questions about the Ph.D. program in robotics at Georgia Tech. Tucker is also an alumni of the Mobile Robotics Lab at Tech and his advice on lab-related issues has been invaluable to me. Charles Isbell actually volunteered to be on my dissertation committee because he liked my topic. I really enjoyed our discussions about machine learning and its applications to v robotics. Harvey Lipkin is the only professor in my long career as a student that tried to do something about my messy handwriting. He tactfully handed back my midterm exam with a pencil and an eraser attached to it. This nice gesture might have come too late to improve my handwriting, but I surely learned a lot about robot control and dynamics in his class. This knowledge came in very handy when I was programming my dynamics robot simulator. I also would like to thank Chris Atkeson and Sven Koenig who served on my qualifying exam committee. Sven also served on my dissertation proposal committee. Formerly at Georgia Tech, they have since moved to Carnegie Mellon and USC, respectively, but I still miss our conversations. I also would like to thank the funding agencies and sponsors that paid for my graduate student salary. The Yamaha Motor Company sponsored my first project as a graduate student; the research work on that project solidified my belief that robotics is the field that I want to be in. The Humanoids research group at Honda R&D in Tokyo, Japan sponsored my second research project. In April of 2000 I was fortunate to be among the few people in the world to see a live demo of their humanoid robot P3. This first-hand experience made me a believer that one day our world would be inhabited by robots walking and working beside us. I strove to make a contribution that will bring us closer to that vision. Next, I worked on three DARPA-funded projects: Tactical Mobile Robotics (TMR), Mobile Autonomous Robot Software (MARS), and Mobile Autonomous Robot Software vision 2020 (MARS- 2020). I am confident that there are few experiences in life that can match the excitement of a large-scale DARPA demo. I was fortunate to take part in two such demos at Rockville, Maryland and Fort Benning, Georgia. Many thanks to my fellow graduate students from the Mobile Robotics Lab: Yoichiro Endo, Zsolt Kira, Alan Wagner, Patrick Ulam, Lilia Moshkina, Eric Martinson, Matt Pow- eres, Michael Kaess, and Ananth Ranganathan. The long hours in the lab and the cold mornings of DARPA demo days were more enjoyable when you were around. In the Fall of 2005 I had the opportunity and the pleasure of teaching the first ever graduate class in Developmental Robotics. This dissertation, which was finished after the vi class was over, is a lot more coherent and readable, I think, because of this class. As they say you never know something until you have to explain it in the classroom. Therefore, I would like to thank the students in my graduate class (Adam, Adrian, Allen, Bradley, Dae- Ki, Dustin, Flavian, Georgi, Jacob, Jesse, Jie, Jivko, John, Kevin, Kewei, Lou, Matthew M., Matthew P., Michael, Oksana, Ryan, Tanasha, and Tyler) for the many stimulating class discussions and insightful answers to the open questions in Developmental Robotics that I sneaked into their homework assignments. I also would like to thank the chair of the Computer Science Department at Iowa State University, Carl Chang, for giving me the opportunity to teach this class. Many thanks to my ISU colleague Vasant Honavar who encouraged me to teach a new experimental class in robotics as my first class. Many thanks are also due to my colleagues from the Virtual Reality Applications Center at Iowa State University: Jim Oliver, Derrick Parkhurst, and Eliot Winer. They provided me with perfect working conditions at the start of my career and gave me enough breathing room to finish this dissertation. I also would like to thank the GVU center at Georgia Tech, the National Science Foun- dation (NSF), and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) for awarding me several travel grants, which allowed me to attend academic conferences in my area. The Bulgarian branch of the Open Society Foundation paid for my first airplane ticket to the United States and for two years of my undergraduate education at the American University in Bulgaria, which is deeply appreciated. I would like to thank my Bulgarian friends at Tech, Ivan Ganev and Yavor Angelov, for their technical help and encouragement over the years. I also would like to thank my mother and my two sisters for believing in my abilities and encouraging me to pursue my dreams. They were certainly not happy about me going to graduate school seven thousand miles away from home but they knew that this was the best thing for me and did not try to stop me.

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