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Human-aware robot navigation promises a range of applications in which mobile robots bring versatile assistance to people in common human environments. While prior research has mostly focused on modeling pedestrians as independent,…
Robot navigation through crowds poses a difficult challenge to AI systems, since the methods should result in fast and efficient movement but at the same time are not allowed to compromise safety. Most approaches to date were focused on the…
This paper proposes a novel learning-based control policy with strong generalizability to new environments that enables a mobile robot to navigate autonomously through spaces filled with both static obstacles and dense crowds of…
Robot assistants for older adults and people with disabilities need to interact with their users in collaborative tasks. The core component of these systems is an interaction manager whose job is to observe and assess the task, and infer…
A single mobile service robot may generate hundreds of encounters with pedestrians, yet there is little published data on the factors influencing these incidental human-robot encounters. We report the results of a between-subjects…
Deep reinforcement learning has seen successful implementations on humanoid robots to achieve dynamic walking. However, these implementations have been so far successful in simple environments void of obstacles. In this paper, we aim to…
Mastering robotic manipulation skills through reinforcement learning (RL) typically requires the design of shaped reward functions. Recent developments in this area have demonstrated that using sparse rewards, i.e. rewarding the agent only…
Research currently being conducted on the use of robots as human labor support technology. In particular, the service industry needs to allocate more manpower, and it will be important for robots to support people. This study focuses on…
Social robots are expected to be a human labor support technology, and one application of them is an advertising medium in public spaces. When social robots provide information, such as recommended shops, adaptive communication according to…
Reinforcement learning shows great potential to solve complex contact-rich robot manipulation tasks. However, the safety of using RL in the real world is a crucial problem, since unexpected dangerous collisions might happen when the RL…
Human demonstrations can provide trustful samples to train reinforcement learning algorithms for robots to learn complex behaviors in real-world environments. However, obtaining sufficient demonstrations may be impractical because many…
In this paper, we present an algorithm to efficiently learn socially-compliant navigation policies from observations of human trajectories. As mobile robots come to inhabit and traffic social spaces, they must account for social cues and…
Grasping objects under uncertainty remains an open problem in robotics research. This uncertainty is often due to noisy or partial observations of the object pose or shape. To enable a robot to react appropriately to unforeseen effects, it…
In recent years, the growing demand for more intelligent service robots is pushing the development of mobile robot navigation algorithms to allow safe and efficient operation in a dense crowd. Reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have…
For a natural social human-robot interaction, it is essential for a robot to learn the human-like social skills. However, learning such skills is notoriously hard due to the limited availability of direct instructions from people to teach a…
When robots enter everyday human environments, they need to understand their tasks and how they should perform those tasks. To encode these, reward functions, which specify the objective of a robot, are employed. However, designing reward…
Close and precise placement of irregularly shaped objects requires a skilled robotic system. The manipulation of objects that have sensitive top surfaces and a fixed set of neighbors is particularly challenging. To avoid damaging the…
For the most comfortable, human-aware robot navigation, subjective user preferences need to be taken into account. This paper presents a novel reinforcement learning framework to train a personalized navigation controller along with an…
In recent years, legged and wheeled-legged robots have gained prominence for tasks in environments predominantly created for humans across various domains. One significant challenge faced by many of these robots is their limited capability…
Robots often need to convey information to human users. For example, robots can leverage visual, auditory, and haptic interfaces to display their intent or express their internal state. In some scenarios there are socially agreed upon…