Related papers: Core Challenges of Social Robot Navigation: A Surv…
Social robot navigation is an evolving research field that aims to find efficient strategies to safely navigate dynamic environments populated by humans. A critical challenge in this domain is the accurate modeling of human motion, which…
Social robot navigation algorithms are often demonstrated in overly simplified scenarios, prohibiting the extraction of practical insights about their relevance to real-world domains. Our key insight is that an understanding of the inherent…
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.…
Recently, research in human-robot interaction began to consider a robot's influence at the group level. Despite the recent growth in research investigating the effects of robots within groups of people, our overall understanding of what…
Autonomous mobile robots need to perceive the environments with their onboard sensors (e.g., LiDARs and RGB cameras) and then make appropriate navigation decisions. In order to navigate human-inhabited public spaces, such a navigation task…
Recent protocols and metrics for training and evaluating autonomous robot navigation through crowds are inconsistent due to diversified definitions of "social behavior". This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to effectively compare…
Sociability is essential for modern robots to increase their acceptability in human environments. Traditional techniques use manually engineered utility functions inspired by observing pedestrian behaviors to achieve social navigation.…
Navigation in dense crowds is a well-known open problem in robotics with many challenges in mapping, localization, and planning. Traditional solutions consider dense pedestrians as passive/active moving obstacles that are the cause of all…
Sidewalk robots are increasingly common across the globe. Yet, their operation on public paths poses challenges for people with mobility disabilities (PwMD) who face barriers to accessibility, such as insufficient curb cuts. We interviewed…
Socially aware navigation is a fast-evolving research area in robotics that enables robots to move within human environments while adhering to the implicit human social norms. The advent of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has accelerated…
Autonomous navigation in highly populated areas remains a challenging task for robots because of the difficulty in guaranteeing safe interactions with pedestrians in unstructured situations. In this work, we present a crowd navigation…
Climate change is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century, and many in the robotics community are looking for ways to contribute. This paper presents a roadmap for climate-relevant robotics research, identifying high-impact…
Navigation is one of the most heavily studied problems in robotics, and is conventionally approached as a geometric mapping and planning problem. However, real-world navigation presents a complex set of physical challenges that defies…
Empowering robots to navigate in a socially compliant manner is essential for the acceptance of robots moving in human-inhabited environments. Previously, roboticists have developed geometric navigation systems with decades of empirical…
For robotic vehicles to navigate safely and efficiently in pedestrian-rich environments, it is important to model subtle human behaviors and navigation rules (e.g., passing on the right). However, while instinctive to humans, socially…
Motivated by the vision of integrating mobile robots closer to humans in warehouses, hospitals, manufacturing plants, and the home, we focus on robot navigation in dynamic and spatially constrained environments. Ensuring human safety,…
Over the last years, social robots have been deployed in public environments making evident the need of human-aware navigation capabilities. In this regard, the robotics community have made efforts to include proxemics or social conventions…
Social robots are increasingly being deployed in public spaces, where they face not only technological difficulties and unexpected user utterances, but also objections from stakeholders who may not be comfortable with introducing a robot…
Human-aware robot navigation promises a range of applications in which mobile robots bring versatile assistance to people in common human environments. While prior research has mostly focused on modeling pedestrians as independent,…
Social, also called human-aware, navigation is a key challenge for the integration of mobile robots into human environments. The evaluation of such systems is complex, as factors such as comfort, safety, and legibility must be considered.…