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Understanding the collective dynamics of crowd movements during stressful emergency situations is central to reducing the risk of deadly crowd disasters. Yet, their systematic experimental study remains a challenging open problem due to…
Animating and simulating crowds using an agent-based approach is a well-established area where every agent in the crowd is individually controlled such that global human-like behaviour emerges. We observe that human navigation and movement…
Collective animal movement fascinates children and scientists alike. One of the most commonly given explanations for collective animal movement is improved foraging. Animals are hypothesized to gain from searching for food in groups. Here,…
AI companion chatbots are increasingly used for emotional support, with prior work in the domain predominantly documenting their mixed psychosocial impacts, including both increased emotional expression and heightened loneliness. However,…
Despite being a hot research topic for a decade, drones are still not part of our everyday life. In this article, we analyze the reasons for this state of affairs and look for ways of improving the situation. We rely on the achievements of…
Collective animal behaviors are paradigmatic examples of fully decentralized operations involving complex collective computations such as collective turns in flocks of birds or collective harvesting by ants. These systems offer a unique…
This work aims at showing that it is feasible and safe to use a swarm of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) indoors alongside humans. UAVs are increasingly being integrated under the Industry 4.0 framework. UAV swarms are primarily deployed…
Social mediator robots facilitate human-human interactions by producing behavior strategies that positively influence how humans interact with each other in social settings. As robots for social mediation gain traction in the field of…
Swarm robotics is the study of how a large number of relatively simple robots can be designed so that a desired collective behaviour emerges from the local interactions among robots and between the robots and their environment. While many…
Real-time multi-agent collision-avoidance algorithms comprise a key enabling technology for the practical use of self-organising swarms of drones. This paper proposes a decentralised reciprocal collision-avoidance algorithm, which is based…
We present experimental results on the single file motion of a group of robots interacting with each other through position sensors. We successfully replicate the fundamental diagram typical of these systems, with a transition from free…
Attacks by drones (i.e., unmanned combat air vehicles) continue to generate heated political and ethical debates. Here we examine the quantitative nature of drone attacks, focusing on how their intensity and frequency compare with that of…
Animal groups frequently move in a highly organized manner, as represented by flocks of birds and schools of fish. Despite being an everyday occurrence, we do not yet fully understand how this works. What type of social interactions between…
Human-swarm interaction is facilitated by a low-dimensional encoding of the swarm formation, independent of the (possibly large) number of robots. We propose using image moments to encode two-dimensional formations of robots. Each robot…
Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) are becoming very popular every day because of their effectiveness in handling social situations. However, social robots are perceived as intelligent, and thus their decision-making process might have a…
Autonomous drone technology holds significant promise for enhancing search and rescue operations during evacuations by guiding humans toward safety and supporting broader emergency response efforts. However, their application in dynamic,…
In today's high-pressure and isolated society, the demand for emotional support has surged, necessitating innovative solutions. Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) offer a technological approach to providing emotional assistance by leveraging…
Recently, swarms or formations of drones have received increased interest both in the literature and in applications. To dynamically adapt to their operating environment, swarm members need to communicate wirelessly for control and…
Mobility in an effective and socially-compliant manner is an essential yet challenging task for robots operating in crowded spaces. Recent works have shown the power of deep reinforcement learning techniques to learn socially cooperative…
The biologically-inspired swarm paradigm is being used to design self-organizing systems of locally interacting artificial agents. A major difficulty in designing swarms with desired characteristics is understanding the causal relation…