Related papers: Few common failure cases in mobile robots

There is a growing demand for mobile robots to operate in more variable environments, where guaranteeing safe robot navigation is a priority, in addition to time performance. To achieve this, current solutions for local planning use a…

Integrating robots into teams of humans is anticipated to bring significant capability improvements for tasks such as searching potentially hazardous buildings. Trust between humans and robots is recognized as a key enabler for human-robot…

This work addresses the coordination problem of multiple robots with the goal of finding specific hazardous targets in an unknown area and dealing with them cooperatively. The desired behaviour for the robotic system entails multiple…

For service mobile robots to be most effective, it must be possible for non-experts and even end-users to program them to do new tasks. Regardless of the programming method (e.g., by demonstration or traditional programming), robot task…

The primary focus of autonomous driving research is to improve driving accuracy. While great progress has been made, state-of-the-art algorithms still fail at times. Such failures may have catastrophic consequences. It therefore is…

In this paper, we present an experiment, designed to investigate and evaluate the scalability and the robustness aspects of mobile manipulation. The experiment involves performing variations of mobile pick and place actions and…

As robots aspire for long-term autonomous operations in complex dynamic environments, the ability to reliably take mission-critical decisions in ambiguous situations becomes critical. This motivates the need to build systems that have…

This position paper looks briefly at the way we attempt to program robotic AI systems. Many AI systems are based on the idea of trying to improve the performance of one individual system to beyond so-called human baselines. However, these…

Perception algorithms that provide estimates of their uncertainty are crucial to the development of autonomous robots that can operate in challenging and uncontrolled environments. Such perception algorithms provide the means for having…

Robots are increasingly entering uncertain and unstructured environments. Within these, robots are bound to face unexpected external disturbances like accidental human or tool collisions. Robots must develop the capacity to respond to…

Robots applications in our daily life increase at an unprecedented pace. As robots will soon operate "out in the wild", we must identify the safety and security vulnerabilities they will face. Robotics researchers and manufacturers focus…

This paper describes our recent effort to use virtual reality to simulate threatening emergency evacuation scenarios in which a robot guides a person to an exit. Our prior work has demonstrated that people will follow a robot's guidance,…

As robots leave the controlled environments of factories to autonomously function in more complex, natural environments, they will have to respond to the inevitable fact that they will become damaged. However, while animals can quickly…

This paper proposes an initial theory for robotic systems that can be fully self-maintaining. The new design principles focus on functional survival of the robots over long periods of time without human maintenance. Self-maintaining…

As end-to-end robotic policies are progressively deployed in the real world to solve real tasks, they face a gap between the training and inference conditions. Scaling the amount and diversity of the training data has shown some success in…

This paper addresses object perception applied to mobile robotics. Being able to perceive semantically meaningful objects in unstructured environments is a key capability in order to make robots suitable to perform high-level tasks in home…

Robots in real-world environments continuously engage with multiple users and encounter changes that lead to unexpected conflicts in fulfilling user requests. Recent technical advancements (e.g., large-language models (LLMs), program…

Mobile robots are increasingly being used to assist with active pursuit and law enforcement. One major limitation for such missions is the resource (battery) allocated to the robot. Factors like nature and agility of evader, terrain over…

Evacuation of robots from a disk has attained a lot of attention recently. We visit the problem from the perspective of fault-tolerance. We consider two robots trying to evacuate from a disk via a single hidden exit on the perimeter of the…

Robots often localize to lower navigational errors and facilitate downstream, high-level tasks. However, a robot may want to selectively localize when localization is costly (such as with resource-constrained robots) or inefficient (for…