Related papers: Autonomous Social Distancing in Urban Environments…
Swarm perception refers to the ability of a robot swarm to utilize the perception capabilities of each individual robot, forming a collective understanding of the environment. Their distributed nature enables robot swarms to continuously…
The deployment of robots in industrial and civil scenarios is a viable solution to protect operators from danger and hazards. Shared autonomy is paramount to enable remote control of complex systems such as legged robots, allowing the…
We aim to enable a mobile robot to navigate through environments with dense crowds, e.g., shopping malls, canteens, train stations, or airport terminals. In these challenging environments, existing approaches suffer from two common…
Teaching autonomous mobile robots to successfully navigate human crowds is a challenging task. Not only does it require planning, but it requires maintaining social norms which may differ from one context to another. Here we focus on crowd…
This conceptual paper overviews how blockchain technology is involving the operation of multi-robot collaboration for combating COVID-19 and future pandemics. Robots are a promising technology for providing many tasks such as spraying,…
This work proposes a novel approach to social robot navigation by learning to generate robot controls from a social motion latent space. By leveraging this social motion latent space, the proposed method achieves significant improvements in…
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the most common symptom displayed by patients has been a fever, leading to the use of temperature scanning as a preemptive measure to detect potential carriers of the virus. Human employees with handheld…
The proliferation of robots in public spaces necessitates a deeper understanding of how these robots can interact with those they share the space with. In this paper, we present findings from video analysis of publicly deployed cleaning…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, policy makers at the Greater London Authority, the regional governance body of London, UK, are reliant upon prompt and accurate data sources. Large well-defined heterogeneous compositions of activity throughout…
Coronavirus has been spreading around the world since the end of 2019. The virus can cause acute respiratory syndrome, which can be lethal, and is easily transmitted between hosts. Most states have issued state-at-home executive orders,…
This project proposes a bioinspired multi-robot system using Distributed Optimization for efficient exploration and mapping of unknown environments. Each robot explores its environment and creates a map, which is afterwards put together to…
As the presence of autonomous robots in public spaces increases-whether navigating campus walkways or neighborhood sidewalks-understanding how to carefully study these robots becomes critical. While HRI research has conducted field studies…
We present the first decentralized multi-copter flock that performs stable autonomous outdoor flight with up to 10 flying agents. By decentralized and autonomous we mean that all members navigate themselves based on the dynamic information…
Can a quadrupedal robot perform bipedal motions like humans? Although developing human-like behaviors is more often studied on costly bipedal robot platforms, we present a solution over a lightweight quadrupedal robot that unlocks the…
We present a real-time, data-driven algorithm to enhance the social-invisibility of robots within crowds. Our approach is based on prior psychological research, which reveals that people notice and--importantly--react negatively to groups…
Robotic systems need advanced mobility capabilities to operate in complex, three-dimensional environments designed for human use, e.g., multi-level buildings. Incorporating some level of autonomy enables robots to operate robustly,…
Social navigation for bipedal robots remains relatively unexplored due to the highly complex, nonlinear dynamics of bipedal locomotion. This study presents a preliminary exploration of social navigation for bipedal robots in a human crowded…
Collective movement inspired by animal groups promises inherited benefits for robot swarms, such as enhanced sensing and efficiency. However, while animals move in groups using only their local senses, robots often obey central control or…
In this paper, we introduce and study the problem of facility location along with the notion of \emph{`social distancing'}. The input to the problem is the road network of a city where the nodes are the residential zones, edges are the road…
The limited energy capacity of individual robotic agents in a swarm often limits the possible cooperative tasks they can perform. In this work, we investigate the problem of covering an unknown connected grid environment (e.g. a maze or…