Related papers: ProbRobScene: A Probabilistic Specification Langua…
Scenario-based development and test processes are a promising approach for verifying and validating automated driving functions. For this purpose, scenarios have to be generated during the development process in a traceable manner. In early…
Ensuring safe interactions in human-centric environments requires robots to understand and adhere to constraints recognized by humans as "common sense" (e.g., "moving a cup of water above a laptop is unsafe as the water may spill" or…
As robots are being increasingly used in close proximity to humans and objects, it is imperative that robots operate safely and efficiently under real-world conditions. Yet, the environment is seldom known perfectly. Noisy sensors and…
Next-generation intelligent systems must plan and execute complex tasks with imperfect information about their environment. As a result, plans must also include actions to learn about the environment. This is known as active perception.…
When exploring new areas, robotic systems generally exclusively plan and execute controls over geometry that has been directly measured. When entering space that was previously obstructed from view such as turning corners in hallways or…
In situations involving teams of diverse robots, assigning appropriate roles to each robot and evaluating their performance is crucial. These roles define the specific characteristics of a robot within a given context. The stream actions…
Task planning can require defining myriad domain knowledge about the world in which a robot needs to act. To ameliorate that effort, large language models (LLMs) can be used to score potential next actions during task planning, and even…
To economically deploy robotic manipulators the programming and execution of robot motions must be swift. To this end, we propose a novel, constraint-based method to intuitively specify sequential manipulation tasks and to compute…
With more and more digital media, especially in the field of virtual reality where detailed and convincing scenes are much required, procedural scene generation is a big helping tool for artists. A problem is that defining scene…
A service robot can provide a smoother interaction experience if it has the ability to proactively detect whether a nearby user intends to interact, in order to adapt its behavior e.g. by explicitly showing that it is available to provide a…
In this paper, we describe a representation for spatial information, called the stochastic map, and associated procedures for building it, reading information from it, and revising it incrementally as new information is obtained. The map…
Optimizing an expensive-to-query function is a common task in science and engineering, where it is beneficial to keep the number of queries to a minimum. A popular strategy is Bayesian optimization (BO), which leverages probabilistic models…
Anticipating what might happen as a result of an action is an essential ability humans have in order to perform tasks effectively. On the other hand, robots capabilities in this regard are quite lacking. While machine learning is used to…
Many robot control scenarios involve assessing system robustness against a task specification. If either the controller or environment are composed of "black-box" components with unknown dynamics, we cannot rely on formal verification to…
Complex cyber-physical systems interact in real-time and must consider both timing and uncertainty. Developing software for such systems is expensive and difficult, especially when modeling, inference, and real-time behavior must be…
Achieving safe control under uncertainty is a key problem that needs to be tackled for enabling real-world autonomous robots and cyber-physical systems. This paper introduces Probabilistic Safety Programs (PSP) that embed both the…
Scene synthesis is a challenging problem with several industrial applications. Recently, substantial efforts have been directed to synthesize the scene using human motions, room layouts, or spatial graphs as the input. However, few studies…
We present a novel approach for the procedural construction of multi-step contact-rich manipulation tasks in robotics. Our generator takes as input user-defined sets of atomic actions, objects, and spatial predicates and outputs solvable…
Tendon-driven robots, a type of continuum robot, have the potential to reduce the invasiveness of surgery by enabling access to difficult-to-reach anatomical targets. In the future, the automation of surgical tasks for these robots may help…
As drones and autonomous cars become more widespread it is becoming increasingly important that robots can operate safely under realistic conditions. The noisy information fed into real systems means that robots must use estimates of the…