Related papers: Improving User Specifications for Robot Behavior t…
Robot capabilities are maturing across domains, from self-driving cars, to bipeds and drones. As a result, robots will soon no longer be confined to safety-controlled industrial settings; instead, they will directly interact with the…
Accessibility is one of the most important features in the design of robots and their interfaces. This thesis proposes methods that improve the accessibility of robots for three different target audiences: consumers, researchers, and…
Assistive robots have the potential to help people perform everyday tasks. However, these robots first need to learn what it is their user wants them to do. Teaching assistive robots is hard for inexperienced users, elderly users, and users…
Robots often need to be reconfigurable$-$to customize, calibrate, or optimize robots operating in varying environments with different hardware). A particular challenge in robotics is the automated and dynamic reconfiguration to load and…
Learning control policies to perform complex robotics tasks from human preference data presents significant challenges. On the one hand, the complexity of such tasks typically requires learning policies to perform a variety of subtasks,…
In recent years, the demand for social robots has grown, requiring them to adapt their behaviors based on users' states. Accurately assessing user experience (UX) in human-robot interaction (HRI) is crucial for achieving this adaptability.…
This paper addresses the challenge of enabling a single robot to effectively assist multiple humans in decision-making for task planning domains. We introduce a comprehensive framework designed to enhance overall team performance by…
This work addresses human intention identification during physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI) tasks to include this information in an assistive controller. To this purpose, human intention is defined as the desired trajectory that the…
Augmented Reality (AR) offers powerful visualization capabilities for industrial robot training, yet current interfaces remain predominantly static, failing to account for learners' diverse cognitive profiles. In this paper, we present an…
AI-supported tools can help learners overcome challenges in programming education by providing adaptive assistance. However, existing research often focuses on individual tools rather than deriving broader design recommendations. A key…
Mobile manipulator platforms, like the Stretch RE1 robot, make the promise of in-home robotic assistance feasible. For people with severe physical limitations, like those with quadriplegia, the ability to tele-operate these robots…
Behavior Trees constitute a widespread AI tool which has been successfully spun out in robotics. Their advantages include simplicity, modularity, and reusability of code. However, Behavior Trees remain a high-level decision making engine;…
Adaptive task planning is fundamental to ensuring effective and seamless human-robot collaboration. This paper introduces a robot task planning framework that takes into account both human leading/following preferences and performance,…
Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) can enable robots to learn to perform tasks based on an individual's preferences without requiring a hand-crafted reward function. However, existing approaches either assume access to a…
Exoskeletons and orthoses are wearable mobile systems providing mechanical benefits to the users. Despite significant improvements in the last decades, the technology is not fully mature to be adopted for strenuous and non-programmed tasks.…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become widely adopted in robot control. Despite many successes, one major persisting problem can be very low data efficiency. One solution is interactive feedback, which has been shown to speed up RL…
Autonomous agents (robots) face tremendous challenges while interacting with heterogeneous human agents in close proximity. One of these challenges is that the autonomous agent does not have an accurate model tailored to the specific human…
Understanding user enjoyment is crucial in human-robot interaction (HRI), as it can impact interaction quality and influence user acceptance and long-term engagement with robots, particularly in the context of conversations with social…
In order to demonstrate the limitations of assistive robotic capabilities in noisy real-world environments, we propose a Decision-Making Scenario analysis approach that examines the challenges due to user and environmental uncertainty, and…
A solid methodology to understand human perception and preferences in human-robot interaction (HRI) is crucial in designing real-world HRI. Social cognition posits that the dimensions Warmth and Competence are central and universal…