Related papers: REFORM: Recognizing F-formations for Social Robots
For soft robots to work effectively in human-centered environments, they need to be able to estimate their state and external interactions based on (proprioceptive) sensors. Estimating disturbances allows a soft robot to perform desirable…
This article surveys reinforcement learning approaches in social robotics. Reinforcement learning is a framework for decision-making problems in which an agent interacts through trial-and-error with its environment to discover an optimal…
Robots that interact with humans in a physical space or application need to think about the person's posture, which typically comes from visual sensors like cameras and infra-red. Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms use…
Machine learning (ML) methods are proliferating in scientific research. However, the adoption of these methods has been accompanied by failures of validity, reproducibility, and generalizability. These failures can hinder scientific…
Distilling knowledge from human demonstrations is a promising way for robots to learn and act. Existing methods, which often rely on coarsely-aligned video pairs, are typically constrained to learning global or task-level features. As a…
Social mediator robots facilitate human-human interactions by producing behavior strategies that positively influence how humans interact with each other in social settings. As robots for social mediation gain traction in the field of…
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,…
As human-robot collaboration advances, natural and flexible communication methods are essential for effective robot control. Traditional methods relying on a single modality or rigid rules struggle with noisy or misaligned data as well as…
Group processes refer to the dynamics that occur within a group and are critical for understanding how groups function. With robots being increasingly placed within small groups, improving these processes has emerged as an important…
This paper presents the initial results from our structured literature review on applications of Formal Methods (FM) to Robotic Autonomous Systems (RAS). We describe our structured survey methodology; including database selection and…
User simulation has been a cost-effective technique for evaluating conversational recommender systems. However, building a human-like simulator is still an open challenge. In this work, we focus on how users reformulate their utterances…
The detection of free-standing conversing groups has received significant attention in recent years. In the absence of a formal definition, most studies operationalize the notion of a conversation group either through a spatial or a…
Integrating Large Language Models (VLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with robotic systems enables robots to process and understand complex natural language instructions and visual information. However, a fundamental challenge remains:…
Robot-moderated group discussions have the potential to facilitate engaging and productive interactions among human participants. Previous work on topic management in conversational agents has predominantly focused on human engagement and…
Geometric organization of objects into semantically meaningful arrangements pervades the built world. As such, assistive robots operating in warehouses, offices, and homes would greatly benefit from the ability to recognize and rearrange…
Social robot navigation is an evolving research field that aims to find efficient strategies to safely navigate dynamic environments populated by humans. A critical challenge in this domain is the accurate modeling of human motion, which…
As hardware and software systems have grown in complexity, formal methods have been indispensable tools for rigorously specifying acceptable behaviors, synthesizing programs to meet these specifications, and validating the correctness of…
The future will be replete with scenarios where humans are robots will be working together in complex environments. Teammates interact, and the robot's interaction has to be about getting useful information about the human's (teammate's)…
Capturing contextual dependencies has proven useful to improve the representational power of deep neural networks. Recent approaches that focus on modeling global context, such as self-attention and non-local operation, achieve this goal by…
Deformable object manipulation (DOM) for robots has a wide range of applications in various fields such as industrial, service and health care sectors. However, compared to manipulation of rigid objects, DOM poses significant challenges for…