Related papers: Reuleaux: Robot Base Placement by Reachability Ana…

Base placement optimization (BPO) is a fundamental capability for mobile manipulation and has been researched for decades. However, it is still very challenging for some reasons. First, compared with humans, current robots are extremely…

In this paper, we outline an interleaved acting and planning technique to rapidly reduce the uncertainty of the estimated robot's pose by perceiving relevant information from the environment, as recognizing an object or asking someone for a…

Robotic automation is a key technology that increases the efficiency and flexibility of manufacturing processes. However, one of the challenges in deploying robots in novel environments is finding the optimal base pose for the robot, which…

Robots are good at performing repetitive tasks in modern manufacturing industries. However, robot motions are mostly planned and preprogrammed with a notable lack of adaptivity to task changes. Even for slightly changed tasks, the whole…

Recent advances in learning-based robot manipulation have produced policies with remarkable capabilities. Yet, reliability at deployment remains a fundamental barrier to real-world use, where distribution shift, compounding errors, and…

We present a generalised architecture for reactive mobile manipulation while a robot's base is in motion toward the next objective in a high-level task. By performing tasks on-the-move, overall cycle time is reduced compared to methods…

For mobile robots, navigating cluttered or dynamic environments often necessitates non-prehensile manipulation, particularly when faced with objects that are too large, irregular, or fragile to grasp. The unpredictable behavior and varying…

As robots are deployed in complex situations, engineers and end users must develop a holistic understanding of their behaviors, capabilities, and limitations. Some behaviors are directly optimized by the objective function. They often…

The objective of this work is to expand upon previous works, considering socially acceptable behaviours within robot navigation and interaction, and allow a robot to closely approach static and dynamic individuals or groups. The space…

Human-Robot-Collaboration can enhance workflows by leveraging the mutual strengths of human operators and robots. Planning and understanding robot movements remain major challenges in this domain. This problem is prevalent in dynamic…

Multi-robot patrolling is the potential application for robotic systems to survey wide areas efficiently without human burdens and mistakes. However, such systems have few examples of real-world applications due to their lack of human…

Controlling robots to perform tasks via natural language is one of the most challenging topics in human-robot interaction. In this work, we present a robot system that follows unconstrained language instructions to pick and place arbitrary…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is effective in many robotic applications, but it requires extensive exploration of the state-action space, during which behaviors can be unsafe. This significantly limits its applicability to large robots with…

Localization, that is the estimation of a robot's location from sensor data, is a fundamental problem in mobile robotics. This papers presents a version of Markov localization which provides accurate position estimates and which is tailored…

Robot localization is a one of the most important problems in robotics. Most of the existing approaches assume that the map of the environment is available beforehand and focus on accurate metrical localization. In this paper, we address…

Robotics is undergoing a significant transformation powered by advances in high-level control techniques based on machine learning, giving rise to the field of robot learning. Recent progress in robot learning has been accelerated by the…

The ability of robots to estimate their location is crucial for a wide variety of autonomous operations. In settings where GPS is unavailable, measurements of transmissions from fixed beacons provide an effective means of estimating a…

We address the problem of motion planning for a robotic manipulator with the task to place a grasped object in a cluttered environment. In this task, we need to locate a collision-free pose for the object that a) facilitates the stable…

In many applications, a mobile manipulator robot is required to grasp a set of objects distributed in space. This may not be feasible from a single base pose and the robot must plan the sequence of base poses for grasping all objects,…

Robot-to-human handovers often rely on static, open-loop strategies (or, at best, approaches that adapt only the position), which generally do not consider how the object will be grasped by the human, thus requiring the user to adapt. This…