Related papers: Target Reaching Behaviour for Unfreezing the Robot…
We aim to enable a mobile robot to navigate through environments with dense crowds, e.g., shopping malls, canteens, train stations, or airport terminals. In these challenging environments, existing approaches suffer from two common…
Socially aware robot navigation is a planning paradigm where the robot navigates in human environments and tries to adhere to social constraints while interacting with the humans in the scene. These navigation strategies were further…
Navigation strategies that intentionally incorporate contact with humans (i.e. "contact-based" social navigation) in crowded environments are largely unexplored even though collision-free social navigation is a well studied problem.…
A widely accepted explanation for robots planning overcautious or overaggressive trajectories alongside human is that the crowd density exceeds a threshold such that all feasible trajectories are considered unsafe -- the freezing robot…
The deployment of robot assistants in large indoor spaces has seen significant growth, with escorting tasks becoming a key application. However, most current escorting robots primarily rely on navigation-focused strategies, assuming that…
When mobile robots maneuver near people, they run the risk of rudely blocking their paths; but not all people behave the same around robots. People that have not noticed the robot are the most difficult to predict. This paper investigates…
Large efforts have focused on ensuring that the controllers for mobile service robots follow proxemics and other social rules to ensure both safe and socially acceptable distance to pedestrians. Nonetheless, involuntary contact may be…
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…
We present Frozone, a novel algorithm to deal with the Freezing Robot Problem (FRP) that arises when a robot navigates through dense scenarios and crowds. Our method senses and explicitly predicts the trajectories of pedestrians and…
This work proposes a novel approach to social robot navigation by learning to generate robot controls from a social motion latent space. By leveraging this social motion latent space, the proposed method achieves significant improvements in…
Mobile robots are increasingly being deployed in public spaces such as shopping malls, airports, and urban sidewalks. Most of these robots are designed with human-aware motion planning capabilities but are not designed to communicate with…
Current approaches in human-aware or social robot navigation address the humans that are visible to the robot. However, it is also important to address the possible emergences of humans to avoid shocks or surprises to humans and erratic…
As robots have become increasingly common in human-rich environments, it is critical that they are able to exhibit social cues to be perceived as a cooperative and socially-conformant team member. We investigate the effect of robot gaze…
Robotic guidance systems have shown promise in supporting blind and visually impaired (BVI) individuals with wayfinding and obstacle avoidance. However, most existing systems assume a clear path and do not support a critical aspect of…
Understanding human intentions is critical for safe and effective human-robot collaboration. While state of the art methods for human goal prediction utilize learned models to account for the uncertainty of human motion data, that data is…
Robust motion planning is a well-studied problem in the robotics literature, yet current algorithms struggle to operate scalably and safely in the presence of other moving agents, such as humans. This paper introduces a novel framework for…
Both pedestrian and robot comfort are of the highest priority whenever a robot is placed in an environment containing human beings. In the case of pedestrian-unaware mobile robots this desire for safety leads to the freezing robot problem,…
In recent years, impressive results have been achieved in robotic manipulation. While many efforts focus on generating collision-free reference signals, few allow safe contact between the robot bodies and the environment. However, in…
In this work, we aim to enable legged robots to learn how to interpret human social cues and produce appropriate behaviors through physical human guidance. However, learning through physical engagement can place a heavy burden on users when…
Robot-assisted navigation is a perfect example of a class of applications requiring flexible control approaches. When the human is reliable, the robot should concede space to their initiative. When the human makes inappropriate choices the…