Related papers: Visual Room-Awareness for Humanoid Robot Self-Loca…
Current robot autonomy struggles to operate beyond the assumed Operational Design Domain (ODD), the specific set of conditions and environments in which the system is designed to function, while the real-world is rife with uncertainties…
Visual localization allows autonomous robots to relocalize when losing track of their pose by matching their current observation with past ones. However, ambiguous scenes pose a challenge for such systems, as repetitive structures can be…
We consider an autonomous navigation robot that can accept human commands through natural language to provide services in an indoor environment. These natural language commands may include time, position, object, and action components.…
Safe human-robot interactions require robots to be able to learn how to behave appropriately in \sout{humans' world} \rev{spaces populated by people} and thus to cope with the challenges posed by our dynamic and unstructured environment,…
The field of collaborative robotics and human-robot interaction often focuses on the prediction of human behaviour, while assuming the information about the robot setup and configuration being known. This is often the case with fixed…
Learning robot objective functions from human input has become increasingly important, but state-of-the-art techniques assume that the human's desired objective lies within the robot's hypothesis space. When this is not true, even methods…
This paper addresses the problem of enabling a robot to search for a semantic object, i.e., an object with a semantic label, in an unknown and GPS-denied environment. For the robot in the unknown environment to detect and find the target…
Reliable fall recovery is critical for humanoids operating in cluttered environments. Unlike quadrupeds or wheeled robots, humanoids experience high-energy impacts, complex whole-body contact, and large viewpoint changes during a fall,…
Accurate localization in diverse environments is a fundamental challenge in computer vision and robotics. The task involves determining a sensor's precise position and orientation, typically a camera, within a given space. Traditional…
Human-centered environments are rich with a wide variety of spatial relations between everyday objects. For autonomous robots to operate effectively in such environments, they should be able to reason about these relations and generalize…
Finding obstacle-free paths in unknown environments is a big navigation issue for visually impaired people and autonomous robots. Previous works focus on obstacle avoidance, however they do not have a general view of the environment they…
Enabling robots to understand the world in terms of objects is a critical building block towards higher level autonomy. The success of foundation models in vision has created the ability to segment and identify nearly all objects in the…
Rearrangement planning for object retrieval tasks from confined spaces is a challenging problem, primarily due to the lack of open space for robot motion and limited perception. Several traditional methods exist to solve object retrieval…
Majority of the existing robot navigation systems, which facilitate the use of laser range finders, sonar sensors or artificial landmarks, has the ability to locate itself in an unknown environment and then build a map of the corresponding…
Reinforcement learning (RL) for bipedal locomotion has recently demonstrated robust gaits over moderate terrains using only proprioceptive sensing. However, such blind controllers will fail in environments where robots must anticipate and…
One of the key arguments for building robots that have similar form factors to human beings is that we can leverage the massive human data for training. Yet, doing so has remained challenging in practice due to the complexities in humanoid…
Vision-language models (VLMs) have advanced rapidly, but their ability to capture spatial relationships remains a blindspot. Current VLMs are typically built with contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) style image encoders. The…
In Monocular Keyframe Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (MKVSLAM) frameworks, when incremental position tracking fails, global pose has to be recovered in a short-time window, also known as short-term relocalization. This…
Local or reactive navigation is essential for autonomous mobile robots which operate in an indoor environment. Techniques such as SLAM, computer vision require significant computational power which increases cost. Similarly, using…
Uniform and variable environments still remain a challenge for stable visual localization and mapping in mobile robot navigation. One of the possible approaches suitable for such environments is appearance-based teach-and-repeat navigation,…