Related papers: Human-Centric Active Perception for Autonomous Obs…
The development of autonomous robotic systems offers significant potential for performing complex tasks with precision and consistency. Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have enabled more capable intelligent automation…
This paper explores the estimation of user attention in the setting of a cooperative handheld robot: a robot designed to behave as a handheld tool but that has levels of task knowledge. We use a tool-mounted gaze tracking system, which,…
Reliable Human Orientation Estimation (HOE) from a monocular image is critical for autonomous agents to understand human intention. Significant progress has been made in HOE under full observation. However, the existing methods easily make…
Due to burdensome data requirements, learning from demonstration often falls short of its promise to allow users to quickly and naturally program robots. Demonstrations are inherently ambiguous and incomplete, making correct generalization…
In order to ensure safe autonomous driving, precise information about the conditions in and around the vehicle must be available. Accordingly, the monitoring of occupants and objects inside the vehicle is crucial. In the state-of-the-art,…
The number of multi-robot systems deployed in field applications has increased dramatically over the years. Despite the recent advancement of navigation algorithms, autonomous robots often encounter challenging situations where the control…
This paper presents a vision guidance and control method for autonomous robotic capture and stabilization of orbital objects in a time-critical manner. The method takes into account various operational and physical constraints, including…
COVID-19 pandemic has become a global challenge faced by people all over the world. Social distancing has been proved to be an effective practice to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Against this backdrop, we propose that the surveillance…
Autonomous motion capture (mocap) systems for outdoor scenarios involving flying or mobile cameras rely on i) a robotic front-end to track and follow a human subject in real-time while he/she performs physical activities, and ii) an…
We address a class of manipulation problems where the robot perceives the scene with a depth sensor and can move its end effector in a space with six degrees of freedom -- 3D position and orientation. Our approach is to formulate the…
In human-robot collaboration, the objectives of the human are often unknown to the robot. Moreover, even assuming a known objective, the human behavior is also uncertain. In order to plan a robust robot behavior, a key preliminary question…
Deciding which sensing capabilities to deploy on an agent in uncertain domains is a fundamental engineering challenge, in which one balances task achievability against the high costs of hardware and processing. This problem has previously…
A central problem of surveillance is to monitor multiple targets moving in a large-scale, obstacle-ridden environment with occlusions. This paper presents a novel principled Partially Observable Markov Decision Process-based approach to…
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…
Autonomous multi-robot optical inspection systems are increasingly applied for obtaining inline measurements in process monitoring and quality control. Numerous methods for path planning and robotic coordination have been developed for…
Robots need robust and flexible vision systems to perceive and reason about their environments beyond geometry. Most of such systems build upon deep learning approaches. As autonomous robots are commonly deployed in initially unknown…
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…
One of the core activities of an active observer involves moving to secure a "better" view of the scene, where the definition of "better" is task-dependent. This paper focuses on the task of human pose estimation from videos capturing a…
Rather than having each newly deployed robot create its own map of its surroundings, the growing availability of SLAM-enabled devices provides the option of simply localizing in a map of another robot or device. In cases such as multi-robot…
Operating Earth observing satellites requires efficient planning methods that coordinate activities of multiple spacecraft. The satellite task planning problem entails selecting actions that best satisfy mission objectives for autonomous…