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Robots in urban environments will inevitably encounter situations beyond their capabilities (e.g., delivery robots unable to press traffic light buttons), necessitating bystander assistance. These spontaneous collaborations possess…
Understanding the intentions of human teammates is critical for safe and effective human-robot interaction. The canonical approach for human-aware robot motion planning is to first predict the human's goal or path, and then construct a…
Expressivity--the use of multiple modalities to convey internal state and intent of a robot--is critical for interaction. Yet, due to cost, safety, and other constraints, many robots lack high degrees of physical expressivity. This paper…
Collaborative robots are expected to be able to work alongside humans and in some cases directly replace existing human workers, thus effectively responding to rapid assembly line changes. Current methods for programming contact-rich tasks,…
In the field of Geriatronics, enabling effective and transparent communication between humans and robots is crucial for enhancing the acceptance and performance of assistive robots. Our early-stage research project investigates the…
In this paper, we present a decentralized control approach based on a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) method that employs barrier certificates for safe navigation of multiple nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots in unknown…
Understanding and respecting personal space preferences is essential for socially assistive robots designed for older adult users. This work introduces and evaluates a novel personalized context-aware method for modeling users' proxemics…
Semi-autonomous telerobotic systems allow both humans and robots to exploit their strengths, while enabling personalized execution of a task. However, for new soft robots with degrees of freedom dissimilar to those of human operators, it is…
In this work, we propose a gesture based language to allow humans to interact with robots using their body in a natural way. We have created a new gesture detection model using neural networks and a custom dataset of humans performing a set…
This work proposes a novel approach to social robot navigation by learning to generate robot controls from a social motion latent space. By leveraging this social motion latent space, the proposed method achieves significant improvements in…
We can make it easier for disabled users to control assistive robots by mapping the user's low-dimensional joystick inputs to high-dimensional, complex actions. Prior works learn these mappings from human demonstrations: a non-disabled…
Inter-robot transfer of training data is a little explored topic in learning- and vision-based robot control. Here we propose a transfer method from a robot with a lower Degree-of-Freedom (DoF) to one with a higher DoF utilizing the…
The new industrial settings are characterized by the presence of human and robots that work in close proximity, cooperating in performing the required job. Such a collaboration, however, requires to pay attention to many aspects. Firstly,…
Robots built from soft materials will inherently apply lower environmental forces than their rigid counterparts, and therefore may be more suitable in sensitive settings with unintended contact. However, these robots' applied forces result…
Exploration of unknown environments is crucial for autonomous robots; it allows them to actively reason and decide on what new data to acquire for different tasks, such as mapping, object discovery, and environmental assessment. Existing…
We present a novel learning-based collision avoidance algorithm, CrowdSteer, for mobile robots operating in dense and crowded environments. Our approach is end-to-end and uses multiple perception sensors such as a 2-D lidar along with a…
Many mobile robots rely on 2D laser scanners for localization, mapping, and navigation. However, those sensors are unable to correctly provide distance to obstacles such as glass panels and tables whose actual occupancy is invisible at the…
This paper addresses the problem of robotic cutting during disassembly of products for materials separation and recycling. Waste handling applications differ from milling in manufacturing processes, as they engender considerable variety and…
Video is a scalable observation of physical dynamics: it captures how objects move, how contact unfolds, and how scenes evolve under interaction -- all without requiring robot action labels. Yet translating this temporal structure into…
In human-robot collaboration, there has been a trade-off relationship between the speed of collaborative robots and the safety of human workers. In our previous paper, we introduced a time-optimal path tracking algorithm designed to…