Related papers: The Robot Household Marathon Experiment
A mobile robot deployed for remote inspection, surveying or rescue missions can fail due to various possibilities and can be hardware or software related. These failure scenarios necessitate manual recovery (self-rescue) of the robot from…
Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) have been a rapidly expanding research topic for the past decade. Unlike their counterpart, the automated guided vehicle (AGV), AMRs can make decisions and do not need any previously installed infrastructure…
Robotic manipulation of flexible objects is widely required in both industrial and service applications. Among such objects, paper-like materials exhibit distinct mechanical characteristics compared to cloth, being more sensitive to…
This paper presents a overview of the inaugural Amazon Picking Challenge along with a summary of a survey conducted among the 26 participating teams. The challenge goal was to design an autonomous robot to pick items from a warehouse shelf.…
The 5.0 industry promotes collaborative robots (cobots). This research studies the impacts of cobot collaboration using an experimental setup. 120 participants realized a simple and a complex assembly task. 50% collaborated with another…
We present and evaluate a prototype social robot to encourage daily exercise among older adults in a home setting. Our prototype system, designed to lead users through exercise sessions with motivational feedback, was assessed through a…
A single service robot can present two distinct agencies: its onboard autonomy and an operator-mediated agency, yet users experience them through one physical body. We formalize this dual-agency structure as a User-Robot-Operator triad in…
In this paper we address mobile manipulation planning problems in the presence of sensing and environmental uncertainty. In particular, we consider mobile sensing manipulators operating in environments with unknown geometry and uncertain…
Wheelchair-mounted robotic arms (and other assistive robots) should help their users perform everyday tasks. One way robots can provide this assistance is shared autonomy. Within shared autonomy, both the human and robot maintain control…
This article introduces "Baby Robot", a robot aiming to improve motor skills of babies and toddlers. Authors developed a car-like toy that moves autonomously using reinforcement learning and computer vision techniques. The robot behaviour…
Evaluating learned robot control policies to determine their physical task-level capabilities costs experimenter time and effort. The growing number of policies and tasks exacerbates this issue. It is impractical to test every policy on…
Learning from human demonstrations has exhibited remarkable achievements in robot manipulation. However, the challenge remains to develop a robot system that matches human capabilities and data efficiency in learning and generalizability,…
This research proposes new tools for investigation of behavioral diversity in multi-robot systems and a significant body of results using these tools in simulated and real mobile robot experiments. The experiments specifically describe a…
Scientific competitions are important in robotics because they foster knowledge exchange and allow teams to test their research in unstandardized scenarios and compare result. In the field of service robotics its role becomes crucial.…
With increasing numbers of mobile robots arriving in real-world applications, more robots coexist in the same space, interact, and possibly collaborate. Methods to provide such systems with system size scalability are known, for example,…
Mobile robots are increasingly deployed in cluttered environments with movable objects, posing challenges for traditional methods that prohibit interaction. In such settings, the mobile robot must go beyond traditional obstacle avoidance,…
The ability to accomplish manipulation and locomotion tasks in the presence of significant time-varying external loads is a remarkable skill of humans that has yet to be replicated convincingly by humanoid robots. Such an ability will be a…
Modular robots have the potential to revolutionize automation, as one can optimize their composition for any given task. However, finding optimal compositions is non-trivial. In addition, different compositions require different base…
This paper presents an approach to externally influencing a team of robots by means of time-varying density functions. These density functions represent rough references for where the robots should be located. To this end, a continuous-time…
Autonomous navigation in extreme mountainous terrains poses challenges due to the presence of mobility-stressing elements and undulating surfaces, making it particularly difficult compared to conventional off-road driving scenarios. In such…