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Data generated by users on digital platforms are a crucial resource for advocates and researchers interested in uncovering digital inequities, auditing algorithms, and understanding human behavior. Yet data access is often restricted. How…
We present placing via picking (PvP), a method to autonomously collect real-world demonstrations for a family of placing tasks in which objects must be manipulated to specific, contact-constrained locations. With PvP, we approach the…
The growing presence of service robots in human-centric environments, such as warehouses, demands seamless and intuitive human-robot collaboration. In this paper, we propose a collaborative shelf-picking framework that combines multimodal…
Robotic manipulation stands as a largely unsolved problem despite significant advances in robotics and machine learning in recent years. One of the key challenges in manipulation is the exploration of the dynamics of the environment when…
Unloading containers in the courier, express and parcel industry is a physically demanding and labor-intensive work. Automatizing this process is an important step towards increasing the efficiency of parcel-handling systems. This work…
For robots to assist users with household tasks, they must first learn about the tasks from the users. Further, performing the same task every day, in the same way, can become boring for the robot's user(s), therefore, assistive robots must…
Airlift operations require the timely distribution of various cargo, much of which is time sensitive and valuable. These operations, however, have to contend with sudden disruptions from weather and malfunctions, requiring immediate…
Industrial bin picking for tangled-prone objects requires the robot to either pick up untangled objects or perform separation manipulation when the bin contains no isolated objects. The robot must be able to flexibly perform appropriate…
Individualized manufacturing is becoming an important approach as a means to fulfill increasingly diverse and specific consumer requirements and expectations. While there are various solutions to the implementation of the manufacturing…
The problem of robotic lime picking is challenging; lime plants have dense foliage which makes it difficult for a robotic arm to grasp a lime without coming in contact with leaves. Existing approaches either do not consider leaves, or treat…
Scientific competitions are important in robotics because they foster knowledge exchange and allow teams to test their research in unstandardized scenarios and compare result. In the field of service robotics its role becomes crucial.…
Autonomous robotic manipulation in clutter is challenging. A large variety of objects must be perceived in complex scenes, where they are partially occluded and embedded among many distractors, often in restricted spaces. To tackle these…
Robots are being designed to help people in an increasing variety of settings--but seemingly little attention has been given so far to the specific needs of women, who represent roughly half of the world's population but are highly…
Internet users generate content at unprecedented rates. Building intelligent systems capable of discriminating useful content within this ocean of information is thus becoming a urgent need. In this paper, we aim to predict the usefulness…
Table-top Rearrangement and Planning is a challenging problem that relies heavily on an excellent perception stack. The perception stack involves observing and registering the 3D scene on the table, detecting what objects are on the table,…
Algorithmic decision-making (ADM) increasingly shapes people's daily lives. Given that such autonomous systems can cause severe harm to individuals and social groups, fairness concerns have arisen. A human-centric approach demanded by…
Since its inception in 2016, the Alexa Prize program has enabled hundreds of university students to explore and compete to develop conversational agents through the SocialBot Grand Challenge. The goal of the challenge is to build agents…
With the advent of self-driving cars, experts envision autonomous mobility-on-demand services in the near future to cope with overloaded transportation systems in cities worldwide. Efficient operations are imperative to unlock such a…
Robotic mobile fulfillment systems (RMFSs) are a new type of warehousing system, which has received more attention recently, due to increasing growth in the e-commerce sector. Instead of sending pickers to the inventory area to search for…
Robots are used for collecting samples from natural environments to create models of, for example, temperature or algae fields in the ocean. Adaptive informative sampling is a proven technique for this kind of spatial field modeling. This…