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There are many examples of cases where access to improved models of human behavior and cognition has allowed creation of robots which can better interact with humans, and not least in road vehicle automation this is a rapidly growing area…
With the fast and unstoppable evolution of robotics and artificial intelligence, effective autonomous navigation in real-world scenarios has become one of the most pressing challenges in the literature. However, demanding requirements, such…
The success of the human-robot co-worker team in a flexible manufacturing environment where robots learn from demonstration heavily relies on the correct and safe operation of the robot. How this can be achieved is a challenge that requires…
We consider the setting of an agent with a fixed body interacting with an unknown and uncertain external world. We show that models trained to predict proprioceptive information about the agent's body come to represent objects in the…
A wide range of human-robot collaborative applications in diverse domains such as manufacturing, health care, the entertainment industry, and social interactions, require an autonomous robot to follow its human companion. Different working…
Socially assistive robots provide physical and mental assistance for humans via cognitive human-machine interactions. These robots should sustain long-term engaging interactions with humans in a similar way humans interact with each other.…
The future will be replete with scenarios where humans are robots will be working together in complex environments. Teammates interact, and the robot's interaction has to be about getting useful information about the human's (teammate's)…
We are considering the problem of controlling a team of robotic bodyguards protecting a VIP from physical assault in the presence of neutral and/or adversarial bystanders. This task is part of a much larger class of problems involving…
Humans have a rich representation of the entities in their environment. Entities are described by their attributes, and entities that share attributes are often semantically related. For example, if two books have "Natural Language…
Recent developments in explainable artificial intelligence promise the potential to transform human-robot interaction: Explanations of robot decisions could affect user perceptions, justify their reliability, and increase trust. However,…
We study a human-robot collaborative transportation task in presence of obstacles. The task for each agent is to carry a rigid object to a common target position, while safely avoiding obstacles and satisfying the compliance and actuation…
Social robots need to understand the affective state of the humans with whom they interact. Successful interactions require understanding mood and emotion in the short term, and personality and attitudes over longer periods. Social robots…
Being aware of our body has great importance in our everyday life. This is the reason why we know how to move in a dark room or to grasp a complex object. These skills are important for robots as well, however, robotic bodily awareness is…
Humans inhabit a world defined by interactions -- with other humans, objects, and environments. These interactive movements not only convey our relationships with our surroundings but also demonstrate how we perceive and communicate with…
A common vision from science fiction is that robots will one day inhabit our physical spaces, sense the world as we do, assist our physical labours, and communicate with us through natural language. Here we study how to design artificial…
As intelligent agents transition from controlled to uncontrolled environments, they face challenges that sometimes exceed their operational capabilities. In many scenarios, they rely on assistance from bystanders to overcome those…
Physical agents that can autonomously generate engaging, life-like behaviour will lead to more responsive and interesting robots and other autonomous systems. Although many advances have been made for one-to-one interactions in well…
Autonomous robots require high degrees of cognitive and motoric intelligence to come into our everyday life. In non-structured environments and in the presence of uncertainties, such degrees of intelligence are not easy to obtain.…
Calibrating robots into their workspaces is crucial for manipulation tasks. Existing calibration techniques often rely on sensors external to the robot (cameras, laser scanners, etc.) or specialized tools. This reliance complicates the…
Humans often work closely together and relay a wealth of information through physical interaction. Robots, on the other hand, are not yet able to work similarly closely with humans and to effectively convey information when engaging in…