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Robots, as AI with physical instantiation, inhabit our social and physical world, where their actions have both social and physical consequences, posing challenges for researchers when designing social robots. This study starts with a…
As robots across domains start collaborating with humans in shared environments, algorithms that enable them to reason over human intent are important to achieve safe interplay. In our work, we study human intent through the problem of…
Generative navigation policies have made rapid progress in improving end-to-end learned navigation. Despite their promising results, this paradigm has two structural problems. First, the sampled trajectories exist in an abstract, unscaled…
We claim that navigation in human environments can be viewed as cooperative activity especially in constrained situations. Humans concurrently aid and comply with each other while moving in a shared space. Cooperation helps pedestrians to…
We present SocialGym 2, a multi-agent navigation simulator for social robot research. Our simulator models multiple autonomous agents, replicating real-world dynamics in complex environments, including doorways, hallways, intersections, and…
This paper describes a system whereby a robot detects and track human-meaningful navigational cues as it navigates in an indoor environment. It is intended as the sensor front-end for a mobile robot system that can communicate its…
Collaborative human activities are grounded in social and moral norms, which humans consciously and subconsciously use to guide and constrain their decision-making and behavior, thereby strengthening their interactions and preventing…
This paper presents the framework for a novel Unified Socially-Aware Navigation (USAN) architecture and explains its need in Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR) applications. Our approach emphasizes interpersonal distance and how spatial…
Progress toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has been hindered by a lack of data on key environmental and socioeconomic indicators, which historically have come from ground surveys with sparse temporal and spatial…
Emerging applications of robotics, and concerns about their impact, require the research community to put human-centric objectives front-and-center. To meet this challenge, we advocate an interdisciplinary approach, socially cognizant…
Data scaling and standardized evaluation benchmarks have driven significant advances in natural language processing and computer vision. However, robotics faces unique challenges in scaling data and establishing evaluation protocols.…
Human-Robot-Interaction (HRI) research is typically built around the premise that the robot serves to assist a human in achieving a human-led goal or shared task. However, there are many circumstances during HRI in which a robot may need…
The idea of social participatory sensing provides a substrate to benefit from friendship relations in recruiting a critical mass of participants willing to attend in a sensing campaign. However, the selection of suitable participants who…
Service robotics is recently enhancing precision agriculture enabling many automated processes based on efficient autonomous navigation solutions. However, data generation and infield validation campaigns hinder the progress of large-scale…
Navigating socially in human environments requires more than satisfying geometric constraints, as collision-free paths may still interfere with ongoing activities or conflict with social norms. Addressing this challenge calls for analyzing…
Safety is a long-standing and the final pursuit in the development of autonomous driving systems, with a significant portion of safety challenge arising from perception. How to effectively evaluate the safety as well as the reliability of…
Integrating real-time, complex social signal processing into robotic systems -- especially in real-world, multi-party interaction situations -- is a challenge faced by many in the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) community. The difficulty is…
Since humans and robots are increasingly sharing portions of their operational spaces, experimental evidence is needed to ascertain the safety and social acceptability of robots in human-populated environments. Although several studies have…
We present a novel human-aware navigation approach, where the robot learns to mimic humans to navigate safely in crowds. The presented model, referred to as DeepMoTIon, is trained with pedestrian surveillance data to predict human velocity…
Tactile sensors have been introduced to a wide range of robotic tasks such as robot manipulation to mimic the sense of human touch. However, there has only been a few works that integrate tactile sensing into robot navigation. This paper…