Related papers: Safety-Aware Robot Damage Recovery Using Constrain…
Human awareness in robot motion planning is crucial for seamless interaction with humans. Many existing techniques slow down, stop, or change the robot's trajectory locally to avoid collisions with humans. Although using the information on…
In this context, a major focus of this thesis is on unintentional collisions, where a straight goal is to eliminate injury from users and passerby's via realtime sensing and control systems. A less obvious focus is to combine collision…
Interactive Machine Learning (IML) seeks to integrate human expertise into machine learning processes. However, most existing algorithms cannot be applied to Realworld Scenarios because their state spaces and/or action spaces are limited to…
Industrial human-robot collaborative systems must be validated thoroughly with regard to safety. The sooner potential hazards for workers can be exposed, the less costly is the implementation of necessary changes. Due to the complexity of…
To operate in open-ended environments where humans interact in complex, diverse ways, autonomous robots must learn to predict their behaviour, especially when that behavior is potentially dangerous to other agents or to the robot. However,…
In this paper we present a Bayesian reinforcement learning framework that allows robotic manipulators to adaptively recover from random mechanical failures autonomously, hence being survivable. To this end, we formulate the framework of…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a widely used approach to hyperparameter optimization (HPO). However, most existing HPO methods only incorporate expert knowledge during initialization, limiting practitioners' ability to influence the…
Robots will bring search and rescue (SaR) in disaster response to another level, in case they can autonomously take over dangerous SaR tasks from humans. A main challenge for autonomous SaR robots is to safely navigate in cluttered…
Robotics has proved to be an indispensable tool in many industrial as well as social applications, such as warehouse automation, manufacturing, disaster robotics, etc. In most of these scenarios, damage to the agent while accomplishing…
Rapid performance recovery from unforeseen environmental perturbations remains a grand challenge in swarm robotics. To solve this challenge, we investigate a behaviour adaptation approach, where one searches an archive of controllers for…
Meta-Bayesian optimisation (meta-BO) aims to improve the sample efficiency of Bayesian optimisation by leveraging data from related tasks. While previous methods successfully meta-learn either a surrogate model or an acquisition function…
During learning trials, systems are exposed to different failure conditions which may break robotic parts before a safe behavior is discovered. Humans contour this problem by grounding their learning to a safer structure/control first and…
This paper proposes a robot action planning scheme that provides an efficient and probabilistically safe plan for a robot interacting with an unconcerned human -- someone who is either unaware of the robot's presence or unwilling to engage…
Adaptation capabilities, like damage recovery, are crucial for the deployment of robots in complex environments. Several works have demonstrated that using repertoires of pre-trained skills can enable robots to adapt to unforeseen…
Bipedal locomotion makes humanoid robots inherently prone to falls, causing catastrophic damage to the expensive sensors, actuators, and structural components of full-scale robots. To address this critical barrier to real-world deployment,…
Collision avoidance is key for mobile robots and agents to operate safely in the real world. In this work we present SAFER, an efficient and effective collision avoidance system that is able to improve safety by correcting the control…
Intelligent robots need to generate and execute plans. In order to deal with the complexity of real environments, planning makes some assumptions about the world. When executing plans, the assumptions are usually not met. Most works have…
This paper considers Bayesian optimization (BO) for problems with known outer problem structure. In contrast to the classic BO setting, where the objective function itself is unknown and needs to be iteratively estimated from noisy…
Traditional imitation learning provides a set of methods and algorithms to learn a reward function or policy from expert demonstrations. Learning from demonstration has been shown to be advantageous for navigation tasks as it allows for…
Shared-autonomy imitation learning lets a human correct a robot in real time, mitigating covariate-shift errors. Yet existing approaches ignore two critical factors: (i) the operator's cognitive load and (ii) the risk created by delayed or…