Collaborative Robotics and Adaptive Machines Laboratory

"Infants interleave self-directed exploration, imitative interactions, and learning from others' mistakes to develop increasingly complex skills. My broad research is focused on leveraging these ideas to create robots that learn from, and work side-by-side with, humans. My research projects combine insights from imitation learning, social robotics, human robot collaboration, and other related fields to design robots that cater to diverse application areas like manufacturing and assistive robotics. My long term scientific goal is to use the results of such transdisciplinary research as probes to examine, and understand, the mechanisms of embodied cognition at closer resolutions."

Research Interests:

Swarm Intelligence | Autonomous Systems | Collaborative Robotics | Bioinspired Robotics 


In News:

[At ODU] Published a book recently on Glowworm Swarm Optimization

[UMD News] Paper on safe human robot collaboration wins award at ASME IDETC/CIE 2013, Portland, Oregon.

[UMD News] Paper on stair-climbing robot wins award at CLAWAR 2012, Baltimore, Maryland.

[ScienceNews] Meet the growbots, Vol. 179, No. 3, January 29, 2011.
Refer to the “Picky learner” column, comprising an interview with my postdoc supervisor Prof. Bongard, the wormy robot crawlers I built for this research, and the citation given to our article in Neural Networks Special Issue, Social Cognition: From babies to robots.

[Vermont Public Television] Technology of social sciences, season 2, Emerging Science.
My preliminary work related to postdoctoral research on social robotics was featured in this television episode.

[Popular Mechanics] The (Animal) Robotic Kingdom.
This was based on my paper presentation at ICRA 2006 on Glowworm Swarm Optimization (GSO).

Selected Publications:

1. K. N. Kaipa, A. S. Kankanhalli-Nagendra, N. B. Kumbla, S. Shriyam, S. S. Thevendria-Karthic, J. A. Marvel, and S. K. Gupta (2016). Addressing perception uncertainty induced failure modes in robotic bin-picking. Robotics and Computer Integrated Manufacturing 42(1), 17-38.

2. C. W. Morato, K. N. Kaipa, and S. K. Gupta (2014). Toward safe human robot collaboration by using multiple Kinects based real-time human tracking. ASME Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering, 14(1): 011006.

3. C. W. Morato, K. N. Kaipa, and S. K. Gupta (2013). Improving assembly precedence constraint generation by utilizing motion planning and part interaction clusters, Computer-Aided Design, 45 (11): 1349-1364.

4. K. N. Kaipa, J. C. Bongard, and A. N. Meltzoff (2010). Self discovery enables robot social cognition: Are you my teacher? Neural Networks, Special Issue on Social Cognition: Babies to Robots, 23(8-9): 1113―1124.

5. K. N. Kaipa and D. Ghose (2009). Glowworm swarm optimization for simultaneous capture of multiple local optima of multimodal functions. Swarm Intelligence, 3(2): 87―124.

6. K. N. Kaipa and D. Ghose (2008). Theoretical foundations for rendezvous of glowworm-inspired agent swarms at multiple locations. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 56(7): 549―569.