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This paper explores the challenges faced by assistive robots in effectively cooperating with humans, requiring them to anticipate human behavior, predict their actions' impact, and generate understandable robot actions. The study focuses on…

Nowadays, robots are found in a growing number of areas where they collaborate closely with humans. Enabled by lightweight materials and safety sensors, these cobots are gaining increasing popularity in domestic care, supporting people with…

Multi-legged mobile robots possess high mobility performance in rough terrain environments, stemming from their high postural stability, joint flexibility, and the redundancy provided by multiple legs. In prior research on navigating…

Natural organisms utilize distributed actuation through their musculoskeletal systems to adapt their gait for traversing diverse terrains or to morph their bodies for varied tasks. A longstanding challenge in robotics is to emulate this…

This chapter is about the fundamentals of fabrication, control, and human-robot interaction of a new type of collaborative robotic manipulators, called malleable robots, which are based on adjustable architectures of varying stiffness for…

Participatory design effectively engages stakeholders in technology development but is often constrained by small, resource-intensive activities. This study explores a scalable complementary method, enabling broad pattern identification in…

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…

The demand for social robots in fields like healthcare, education, and entertainment increases due to their emotional adaptation features. These robots leverage multimodal communication, incorporating speech, facial expressions, and…

We present an assistance system that reasons about a human's intended actions during robot teleoperation in order to provide appropriate corrections for unintended behavior. We model the human's physical interaction with a control interface…

This paper proposes a common interface for real-time low-level motion planning of collaborative robotic arms, aimed at enabling broader applicability and improved portability across heterogeneous hardware platforms. In previous work, we…

Ambiguity and noise in natural language instructions create a significant barrier towards adopting autonomous systems into safety critical workflows involving humans and machines. In this paper, we propose to build on recent advances in…

In this paper we present an open source educational robot, designed both to engage children in an affective and social interaction, and to be programmable also in its social and affective behaviour. Indeed the robot, in addition to classic…

We describe a shared control methodology that can, without knowledge of the task, be used to improve a human's control of a dynamic system, be used as a training mechanism, and be used in conjunction with Imitation Learning to generate…

Human-robot interactions have been recognized to be a key element of future industrial collaborative robots (co-robots). Unlike traditional robots that work in structured and deterministic environments, co-robots need to operate in highly…

Planning for legged-wheeled machines is typically done using trajectory optimization because of many degrees of freedom, thus rendering legged-wheeled planners prone to falling prey to bad local minima. We present a combined sampling and…

Recent interest in mobile manipulation has resulted in a wide range of new robot designs. A large family of these designs focuses on modular platforms that combine existing mobile bases with static manipulator arms. They combine these…

Parallel-elastic joints can improve the efficiency and strength of robots by assisting the actuators with additional torques. For these benefits to be realized, a spring needs to be carefully designed. However, designing robots is an…

Coordinating a team of robots to reposition multiple objects in cluttered environments requires reasoning jointly about where robots should establish contact, how to manipulate objects once contact is made, and how to navigate safely and…

An effective human-robot collaborative process results in the reduction of the operator's workload, promoting a more efficient, productive, safer and less error-prone working environment. However, the implementation of collaborative robots…

Intelligent systems are increasingly part of our everyday lives and have been integrated seamlessly to the point where it is difficult to imagine a world without them. Physical manifestations of those systems on the other hand, in the form…