Related papers: Sensorimotor representation learning for an "activ…
Interacting with human agents in complex scenarios presents a significant challenge for robotic navigation, particularly in environments that necessitate both collision avoidance and collaborative interaction, such as indoor spaces. Unlike…
The automatic design of robots has existed for 30 years but has been constricted by serial non-differentiable design evaluations, premature convergence to simple bodies or clumsy behaviors, and a lack of sim2real transfer to physical…
Contemporary approaches to perception, planning, estimation, and control have allowed robots to operate robustly as our remote surrogates in uncertain, unstructured environments. This progress now creates an opportunity for robots to…
As robotic systems become more and more capable of assisting humans in their everyday lives, we must consider the opportunities for these artificial agents to make their human collaborators feel unsafe or to treat them unfairly. Robots can…
The role of robots is expanding from tool to collaborator. Socially assistive robots (SARs) are an example of collaborative robots that assist humans in the real world. As robots enter our social sphere, unforeseen risks occur during…
Robots need robust and flexible vision systems to perceive and reason about their environments beyond geometry. Most of such systems build upon deep learning approaches. As autonomous robots are commonly deployed in initially unknown…
Robot understanding of human intentions is essential for fluid human-robot interaction. Intentions, however, cannot be directly observed and must be inferred from behaviors. We learn a model of adaptive human behavior conditioned on the…
The foundation of this paper is an experiment of fifteen participants interacting directly with an autonomous robot. The task for the participants was to carry a table, in two different setups, together with a robot, which is intended to…
Integrating robots into populated environments is a complex challenge that requires an understanding of human social dynamics. In this work, we propose to model social motion forecasting in a shared human-robot representation space, which…
Expressive behaviors in robots are critical for effectively conveying their emotional states during interactions with humans. In this work, we present a framework that autonomously generates realistic and diverse robotic emotional…
The field of human-human-robot interaction (HHRI) uses social robots to positively influence how humans interact with each other. This objective requires models of human understanding that consider multiple humans in an interaction as a…
The demand for social robots in fields like healthcare, education, and entertainment increases due to their emotional adaptation features. These robots leverage multimodal communication, incorporating speech, facial expressions, and…
This dissertation considers Open-world Robot Manipulation, a manipulation problem where a robot must generalize or quickly adapt to new objects, scenes, or tasks for which it has not been pre-programmed or pre-trained. This dissertation…
The uses of robots are changing from static environments in factories to encompass novel concepts such as Human-Robot Collaboration in unstructured settings. Pre-programming all the functionalities for robots becomes impractical, and hence,…
The future robots are expected to work in a shared physical space with humans [1], however, the presence of humans leads to a dynamic environment that is challenging for mobile robots to navigate. The path planning algorithms designed to…
Humans are able to seamlessly visually imitate others, by inferring their intentions and using past experience to achieve the same end goal. In other words, we can parse complex semantic knowledge from raw video and efficiently translate…
This paper discusses ongoing work in demonstrating research in mobile autonomy in challenging driving scenarios. In our approach, we address fundamental technical issues to overcome critical barriers to assurance and regulation for…
At the core of bodily self-consciousness is the perception of the ownership of one's body. Recent efforts to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms behind the brain's encoding of the self-body have led to various attempts to develop…
We focus on the problem of how we can enable a robot to collaborate seamlessly with a human partner, specifically in scenarios where preexisting data is sparse. Much prior work in human-robot collaboration uses observational models of…
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…