Related papers: The Robot Household Marathon Experiment

Humanoid robots are machines built with an anthropomorphic shape. Despite decades of research into the subject, it is still challenging to tackle the robot locomotion problem from an algorithmic point of view. For example, these machines…

For decades, robotics researchers have pursued various tasks for multi-robot systems, from cooperative manipulation to search and rescue. These tasks are multi-robot extensions of classical robotic tasks and often optimized on dimensions…

For robots to assist users with household tasks, they must first learn about the tasks from the users. Further, performing the same task every day, in the same way, can become boring for the robot's user(s), therefore, assistive robots must…

Humans seamlessly fuse anticipatory planning with immediate feedback to perform successive mobile manipulation tasks without stopping, achieving both high efficiency and reliability. Replicating this fluid and reliable behavior in robots…

A remote collaboration setup allows an expert to instruct a remotely located novice user to help them with a task. Advanced solutions exist in the field of remote guidance and telemanipulation, however, we lack a device that combines these…

This work represents an initial benchmark of a large-scale soft robot performing physical, collaborative manipulation of a long, extended object with a human partner. The robot consists of a pneumatically-actuated, three-link continuum soft…

An important prerequisite for the reliability and robustness of a service robot is ensuring the robot's correct behavior when it performs various tasks of interest. Extensive testing is one established approach for ensuring behavioural…

Multi-modal robots expand their operations from one working medium to another, land to air for example. The majorities of multi-modal robots mainly refer to platforms that operate in two different media. However, for all-terrain tasks,…

We present a fully autonomous real-world RL framework for mobile manipulation that can learn policies without extensive instrumentation or human supervision. This is enabled by 1) task-relevant autonomy, which guides exploration towards…

Learning contact-rich, robotic manipulation skills is a challenging problem due to the high-dimensionality of the state and action space as well as uncertainty from noisy sensors and inaccurate motor control. To combat these factors and…

While both navigation and manipulation are challenging topics in isolation, many tasks require the ability to both navigate and manipulate in concert. To this end, we propose a mobile manipulation system that leverages novel navigation and…

This discussion paper aims to support the argument process for the need to develop a comprehensive science of resilient robotic autonomy. Resilience and its key characteristics relating to robustness, redundancy, and resourcefulness are…

In human-robot collaboration, the objectives of the human are often unknown to the robot. Moreover, even assuming a known objective, the human behavior is also uncertain. In order to plan a robust robot behavior, a key preliminary question…

Utilizing robotic systems in the construction industry is gaining popularity due to their build time, precision, and efficiency. In this paper, we introduce a system that allows the coordination of multiple manipulator robots for…

If robots are to become ubiquitous, they will need to be able to adapt to complex and dynamic environments. Robots that can adapt their bodies while deployed might be flexible and robust enough to meet this challenge. Previous work on…

This paper presents a scalable control algorithm that enables a deployed mobile robot system to make high-level decisions under full consideration of its probabilistic belief. Our approach is based on insights from the rich literature of…

One of the most important promises of decentralized systems is scalability, which is often assumed to be present in robot swarm systems without being contested. Simple limitations, such as movement congestion and communication conflicts,…

Mobile robots are ubiquitous. Such vehicles benefit from well-designed and calibrated control algorithms ensuring their task execution under precise uncertainty bounds. Yet, in tasks involving humans in the loop, such as elderly or mobility…

Robots are increasingly tested in public spaces, towards a future where urban environments are not only for humans but for autonomous systems. While robots are promising, for convenience and efficiency, there are challenges associated with…

We argue that hardware modularity plays a key role in the convergence of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI). We introduce a new approach for building robots that leads to more adaptable and capable machines. We present the concept of…