Related papers: The Robot Household Marathon Experiment

Humans demonstrate an impressive ability to acquire and generalize manipulation "tricks." Even from a single demonstration, such as using soup ladles to reach for distant objects, we can apply this skill to new scenarios involving different…

We present controllers that enable mobile robots to persistently monitor or sweep a changing environment. The changing environment is modeled as a field which grows in locations that are not within range of a robot, and decreases in…

In most cases, upgrading from a single-robot system to a multi-robot system comes with increases in system payload and task performance. On the other hand, many multi-robot systems in open environments still rely on teleoperation.…

Mobile robots are widely used to perform various technological operations in several sectors of the national economy. These operations are related to transporting goods and equipment, performing work to determine the condition of a…

As robots become increasingly prevalent in human environments, there will inevitably be times when a robot needs to interrupt a human to initiate an interaction. Our work introduces the first interruptibility-aware mobile robot system, and…

Robot deployment in realistic dynamic environments is a challenging problem despite the fact that robots can be quite skilled at a large number of isolated tasks. One reason for this is that robots are rarely equipped with powerful…

The paper presents the methodology used for accuracy and repeatability measurements of the experimental model of a parallel robot developed for surgical applications. The experimental setup uses a motion tracking system (for accuracy) and a…

When designing swarm-robotic systems, systematic comparison of algorithms from different domains is necessary to determine which is capable of scaling up to handle the target problem size and target operating conditions. We propose a set of…

In this paper we investigate potential issues of fairness related to the motion of mobile robots. We focus on the particular use case of humanitarian mapping and disaster response. We start by showing that there is a fairness dimension to…

A fruitful collaboration is based on the mutual knowledge of each other skills and on the possibility of communicating their own limits and proposing alternatives to adapt the execution of a task to the capabilities of the collaborators.…

The advantage of modular self-reconfigurable robot systems is their flexibility, but this advantage can only be realized if appropriate configurations (shapes) and behaviors (controlling programs) can be selected for a given task. In this…

In this paper we consider the problem of controlling the dynamic behavior of a multi-robot system while interacting with the environment. In particular, we propose a general methodology that, by means of locally scaling inter-robot coupling…

Scientific competitions are crucial in the field of service robotics. They foster knowledge exchange and allow teams to test their research in unstandardized scenarios and compare result. Such is the case of RoboCup@Home. However, keeping…

A swarm robotic system consists of a team of robots performing cooperative tasks without any centralized coordination. In principle, swarms enable flexible and scalable solutions; however, designing individual control algorithms that can…

Robotic manipulation stands as a largely unsolved problem despite significant advances in robotics and machine learning in recent years. One of the key challenges in manipulation is the exploration of the dynamics of the environment when…

Many collaborative human-robot tasks require the robot to stay safe and work efficiently around humans. Since the robot can only stay safe with respect to its own model of the human, we want the robot to learn a good model of the human in…

Autonomous swarms of robots can bring robustness, scalability and adaptability to safety-critical tasks such as search and rescue but their application is still very limited. Using semi-autonomous swarms with human control can bring robot…

Autonomous robots often encounter challenging situations where their control policies fail and an expert human operator must briefly intervene, e.g., through teleoperation. In settings where multiple robots act in separate environments, a…

We consider a service robot that offers chocolate treats to people passing in its proximity: it has the capability of predicting in advance a person's intention to interact, and to actuate an "offering" gesture, subtly extending the tray of…

We are developing a system for human-robot communication that enables people to communicate with robots in a natural way and is focused on solving problems in a shared space. Our strategy for developing this system is fundamentally…