New Robot Learns Object Arrangement Preferences Without User Input

Kartik Ramachandruni knew he would need to find a unique approach to a populated research field.

With a handful of students and researchers at Georgia Tech looking to make breakthroughs in home robotics and object rearrangement, Ramachandruni searched for what others had overlooked.

“To an extent it was challenging, but it was also an opportunity to look at what people are already doing and to get more familiar with the literature,” said Ramachandruni, a Ph.D. student in Robotics. “(Associate) Professor (Sonia) Chernova helped me in deciding how to zone in on the problem and choose a unique perspective.”

Ramachandruni started exploring how a home robot might organize objects according to user preferences in a pantry or refrigerator without prior instructions required by existing frameworks.

His persistence paid off. The 2023 IEEE International Confrence on Robots and Systems (IROS) accepted Ramachandruni’s paper on a novel framework for a context-aware object rearrangement robot.