Related papers: Introducing the Robot Security Framework (RSF), a …
In modern society, service robots are increasingly recognized for their wide range of practical applications. In large and crowded social spaces, such as museums and hospitals, these robots are required to safely move in the environment…
Cybersecurity lessons have not been learnt from the dawn of other technological industries. In robotics, the existing insecurity landscape needs to be addressed immediately. Several manufacturers profiting from the lack of general awareness…
Risk assessment of a robot in controlled environments, such as laboratories and proving grounds, is a common means to assess, certify, validate, verify, and characterize the robots' safety performance before, during, and even after their…
Open access to publication, software and hardware is central to robotics: it lowers barriers to entry, supports reproducible science and accelerates reliable system development. However, openness also exacerbates the inherent dual-use risks…
The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in robotic systems presents unique safety challenges, particularly in unpredictable environments. Although LLMs, leveraging zero-shot learning, enhance human-robot interaction and…
A major challenge to deploying robots widely is navigation in human-populated environments, commonly referred to as social robot navigation. While the field of social navigation has advanced tremendously in recent years, the fair evaluation…
Ensuring safe interactions in human-centric environments requires robots to understand and adhere to constraints recognized by humans as "common sense" (e.g., "moving a cup of water above a laptop is unsafe as the water may spill" or…
Robots that support humans by performing useful tasks (a.k.a., service robots) are booming worldwide. In contrast to industrial robots, the development of service robots comes with severe software engineering challenges, since they require…
This paper addresses the problem of detecting possible intruders in a group of autonomous robots, which coexist in a shared environment and interact with each other according to a set of "social behaviors", or common rules. Such rules…
The future of transportation is being shaped by technology, and one revolutionary step in improving road safety is the incorporation of robotic systems into driver monitoring infrastructure. This literature review explores the current…
Recent Foundation Model-enabled robotics (FMRs) display greatly improved general-purpose skills, enabling more adaptable automation than conventional robotics. Their ability to handle diverse tasks thus creates new opportunities to replace…
The coordinated assurance of interrelated critical properties, such as system safety and cyber-security, is one of the toughest challenges in critical systems engineering. In this chapter, we summarise approaches to the coordinated…
Continued adoption of agricultural robots postulates the farmer's trust in the reliability, robustness and safety of the new technology. This motivates our work on safety assurance of agricultural robots, particularly their ability to…
Deployment of Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for robotics applications in the real world requires ensuring the safety of the robot and its environment. Safe Robot RL (SRRL) is a crucial step towards achieving human-robot…
The integration of foundation models (FMs) into robotics has accelerated real-world deployment, while introducing new safety challenges arising from open-ended semantic reasoning and embodied physical action. These challenges require safety…
Robotic systems are multi-dimensional entities, combining both hardware and software, that are heavily dependent on, and influenced by, interactions with the real world. They can be variously categorised as embedded, cyberphysical,…
Nowadays, the construction of a complex robotic system requires a high level of specialization in a large number of diverse scientific areas. It is reasonable that a single researcher cannot create from scratch the entirety of this system,…
Autonomous robotic systems are complex, hybrid, and often safety-critical; this makes their formal specification and verification uniquely challenging. Though commonly used, testing and simulation alone are insufficient to ensure the…
The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a widely used framework for building robotic systems. It offers a wide variety of reusable packages and a pattern for new developments. It is up to developers how to combine these elements and integrate…
We present a novel framework for estimating accident-prone regions in everyday indoor scenes, aimed at improving real-time risk awareness in service robots operating in human-centric environments. As robots become integrated into daily…