Related papers: Safe Navigation with Human Instructions in Complex…
Robots operating alongside humans often encounter unfamiliar environments that make autonomous task completion challenging. Though improving models and increasing dataset size can enhance a robot's performance in unseen environments, data…
It is challenging for a mobile robot to navigate through human crowds. Existing approaches usually assume that pedestrians follow a predefined collision avoidance strategy, like social force model (SFM) or optimal reciprocal collision…
As more robots are being deployed into human environments, a human-aware navigation planner needs to handle multiple contexts that occur in indoor and outdoor environments. In this paper, we propose a tunable human-aware robot navigation…
Understanding user instructions in natural language is an active research topic in AI and robotics. Typically, natural user instructions are high-level and can be reduced into low-level tasks expressed in common verbs (e.g., `take', `get',…
Natural language is one of the most intuitive ways to express human intent. However, translating instructions and commands towards robotic motion generation and deployment in the real world is far from being an easy task. The challenge of…
Autonomous navigation in unfamiliar environments often relies on geometric mapping and planning strategies that overlook rich semantic cues such as signs, room numbers, and textual labels. We propose a novel semantic navigation framework…
We present the concept of speed maps: speed limits for mobile robots in human environments. Static speed maps allow for faster navigation on corridors while limiting the speed around corners and in rooms. Dynamic speed maps put limits on…
This paper addresses semantic planning problems in unknown environments under perceptual uncertainty. The environment contains multiple unknown semantically labeled regions or objects, and the robot must reach desired locations while…
For autonomous robots navigating in urban environments, it is important for the robot to stay on the designated path of travel (i.e., the footpath), and avoid areas such as grass and garden beds, for safety and social conformity…
Human navigation in built environments depends on symbolic spatial information which has unrealised potential to enhance robot navigation capabilities. Information sources such as labels, signs, maps, planners, spoken directions, and…
We study the problem of jointly reasoning about language and vision through a navigation and spatial reasoning task. We introduce the Touchdown task and dataset, where an agent must first follow navigation instructions in a real-life visual…
Car-focused navigation services are based on turns and distances of named streets, whereas navigation instructions naturally used by humans are centered around physical objects called landmarks. We present a neural model that takes…
This paper presents a framework to navigate visually impaired people through unfamiliar environments by means of a mobile manipulator. The Human-Robot system consists of three key components: a mobile base, a robotic arm, and the human…
Mobile robots are increasingly populating homes, hospitals, shopping malls, factory floors, and other human environments. Human society has social norms that people mutually accept; obeying these norms is an essential signal that someone is…
We propose, analyze, and experimentally verify a new proactive approach for robot social navigation driven by the robot's "opinion" for which way and by how much to pass human movers crossing its path. The robot forms an opinion over time…
We consider the problem of planning a collision-free path for a high-dimensional robot. Specifically, we suggest a planning framework where a motion-planning algorithm can obtain guidance from a user. In contrast to existing approaches that…
Over the past decade, a multitude of service robots have been developed to fulfill a wide range of practical purposes. Notably, roles such as reception and robotic guidance have garnered extensive popularity. In these positions, robots are…
When navigating in a man-made environment they haven't visited before--like an office building--humans employ behaviors such as reading signs and asking others for directions. These behaviors help humans reach their destinations efficiently…
Recent years have seen an increasing number of applications that have a natural language interface, either in the form of chatbots or via personal assistants such as Alexa (Amazon), Google Assistant, Siri (Apple), and Cortana (Microsoft).…
Mobile robots are traditionally developed to be reactive and avoid collisions with surrounding humans, often moving in unnatural ways without following social protocols, forcing people to behave very differently from human-human interaction…