Related papers: Scaled Autonomy: Enabling Human Operators to Contr…

Roboticists often design with the assumption that assistive robots should be fully autonomous. However, it remains unclear whether users prefer highly autonomous robots, as prior work in assistive robotics suggests otherwise. High robot…

We consider multi-robot applications, where a team of robots can ask for the intervention of a human operator to handle difficult situations. As the number of requests grows, team members will have to wait for the operator attention, hence…

Many tasks, particularly those involving interaction with the environment, are characterized by high variability, making robotic autonomy difficult. One flexible solution is to introduce the input of a human with superior experience and…

Teleoperation has emerged as an alternative solution to fully-autonomous systems for achieving human-level capabilities on humanoids. Specifically, teleoperation with whole-body control is a promising hands-free strategy to command…

Robot teleoperation enables human control over robotic systems in environments where full autonomy is challenging. Recent advancements in low-cost teleoperation devices and VR/AR technologies have expanded accessibility, particularly for…

Human-robot teams will soon be expected to accomplish complex tasks in high-risk and uncertain environments. Here, the human may not necessarily be a robotics expert, but will need to establish a baseline understanding of the robot's…

Navigation is an essential ability for mobile agents to be completely autonomous and able to perform complex actions. However, the problem of navigation for agents with limited (or no) perception of the world, or devoid of a fully defined…

In teleoperation, research has mainly focused on target approaching, where we deal with the more challenging object manipulation task by advancing the shared control technique. Appropriately manipulating an object is challenging due to the…

We can make it easier for disabled users to control assistive robots by mapping the user's low-dimensional joystick inputs to high-dimensional, complex actions. Prior works learn these mappings from human demonstrations: a non-disabled…

Solving mobile manipulation tasks in inaccessible and dangerous environments is an important application of robots to support humans. Example domains are construction and maintenance of manned and unmanned stations on the moon and other…

Advances in autonomy offer the potential for dramatic positive outcomes in a number of domains, yet enabling their safe deployment remains an open problem. This work's motivating question is: In safety-critical settings, can we avoid the…

Deep learning's success in perception, natural language processing, etc. inspires hopes for advancements in autonomous robotics. However, real-world robotics face challenges like variability, high-dimensional state spaces, non-linear…

To exploit the compliant capabilities of soft robot arms we require controller which can exploit their physical capabilities. Teleoperation, leveraging a human in the loop, is a key step towards achieving more complex control strategies.…

Applications like disaster management and industrial inspection often require experts to enter contaminated places. To circumvent the need for physical presence, it is desirable to generate a fully immersive individual live teleoperation…

Shared autonomy provides an effective framework for human-robot collaboration that takes advantage of the complementary strengths of humans and robots to achieve common goals. Many existing approaches to shared autonomy make restrictive…

In teleoperation of contact-rich manipulation tasks, selecting robot impedance is critical but difficult. The robot must be compliant to avoid damaging the environment, but stiff to remain responsive and to apply force when needed. In this…

Getting robots to navigate to multiple objects autonomously is essential yet difficult in robot applications. One of the key challenges is how to explore environments efficiently with camera sensors only. Existing navigation methods mainly…

For a team of heterogeneous robots executing multiple tasks, we propose a novel algorithm to optimally allocate tasks to robots while accounting for their different capabilities. Motivated by the need that robot teams have in many…

A significant problem in designing mobile robot control systems involves coping with the uncertainty that arises in moving about in an unknown or partially unknown environment and relying on noisy or ambiguous sensor data to acquire…

Variable autonomy equips a system, such as a robot, with mixed initiatives such that it can adjust its independence level based on the task's complexity and the surrounding environment. Variable autonomy solves two main problems in robotic…