Related papers: Modeling Supervisor Safe Sets for Improving Collab…

Ensuring human safety in collaborative robotics can compromise efficiency because traditional safety measures increase robot cycle time when human interaction is frequent. This paper proposes a safety-aware approach to mitigate efficiency…

We are considering the problem of controlling a team of robotic bodyguards protecting a VIP from physical assault in the presence of neutral and/or adversarial bystanders. This task is part of a much larger class of problems involving…

We consider the human-aware task planning problem where a human-robot team is given a shared task with a known objective to achieve. Recent approaches tackle it by modeling it as a team of independent, rational agents, where the robot plans…

In order to collaborate safely and efficiently, robots need to anticipate how their human partners will behave. Some of today's robots model humans as if they were also robots, and assume users are always optimal. Other robots account for…

Robots can influence people to accomplish their tasks more efficiently: autonomous cars can inch forward at an intersection to pass through, and tabletop manipulators can go for an object on the table first. However, a robot's ability to…

We consider scenarios where a worker robot, who may be unaware of the human's exact expectations, may have the incentive to deviate from a preferred plan (e.g. safe but costly) when a human supervisor is not monitoring it. On the other…

Effective human-robot collaboration requires informed anticipation. The robot must anticipate the human's actions, but also react quickly and intuitively when its predictions are wrong. The robot must plan its actions to account for the…

In order to develop provably safe human-in-the-loop systems, accurate and precise models of human behavior must be developed. In the case of intelligent vehicles, one can imagine the need for predicting driver behavior to develop minimally…

In recent years, advanced model-based and data-driven control methods are unlocking the potential of complex robotics systems, and we can expect this trend to continue at an exponential rate in the near future. However, ensuring safety with…

We consider a setting where agents take action by following their role models in a social network, and study strategies for a social planner to help agents by revealing whether the role models are positive or negative. Specifically, agents…

We present the design and validation of a centralized controller, called a supervisor, for collision avoidance of multiple human-driven vehicles at a road intersection, considering measurement errors, unmodeled dynamics, and uncontrolled…

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…

Ensuring robot safety can be challenging; user-defined constraints can miss edge cases, policies can become unsafe even when trained from safe data, and safety can be subjective. Thus, we learn about robot safety by showing policy…

The ability to accurately predict human behavior is central to the safety and efficiency of robot autonomy in interactive settings. Unfortunately, robots often lack access to key information on which these predictions may hinge, such as…

In order to enable physical human-robot interaction where humans and (mobile) manipulators share their workspace and work together, robots have to be equipped with important capabilities to guarantee human safety. The robots have to…

Safe reinforcement learning is a promising path toward applying reinforcement learning algorithms to real-world problems, where suboptimal behaviors may lead to actual negative consequences. In this work, we focus on the setting where…

Handing objects to humans is an essential capability for collaborative robots. Previous research works on human-robot handovers focus on facilitating the performance of the human partner and possibly minimising the physical effort needed to…

Human safety has always been the main priority when working near an industrial robot. With the rise of Human-Robot Collaborative environments, physical barriers to avoiding collisions have been disappearing, increasing the risk of accidents…

While much research explores improving robot capabilities, there is a deficit in researching how robots are expected to perform tasks safely, especially in high-risk problem domains. Robots must earn the trust of human operators in order to…

We introduce a novel simulation-based approach to identify hazards that result from unexpected worker behavior in human-robot collaboration. Simulation-based safety testing must take into account the fact that human behavior is variable and…