Related papers: Quadrupedal Robotic Guide Dog with Vocal Human-Rob…
Robots in shared spaces often move in ways that are difficult for people to interpret, placing the burden on humans to adapt. High-DoF robots exhibit motion that people read as expressive, intentionally or not, making it important to…
As the global population ages, many seniors face the problem of loneliness. Companion robots offer a potential solution. However, current companion robots often lack advanced functionality, while task-oriented robots are not designed for…
Performing agile navigation with four-legged robots is a challenging task due to the highly dynamic motions, contacts with various parts of the robot, and the limited field of view of the perception sensors. In this paper, we propose a…
On the one hand, speech is a key aspect to people's communication. On the other, it is widely acknowledged that language proficiency is related to intelligence. Therefore, intelligent robots should be able to understand, at least, people's…
Background: Assistance robots have the potential to increase the independence of people who need daily care due to limited mobility or being wheelchair-bound. Current solutions of attaching robotic arms to motorized wheelchairs offer…
Effective collaboration between a robot and a person requires natural communication. When a robot travels with a human companion, the robot should be able to explain its navigation behavior in natural language. This paper explains how a…
For robots to seamlessly interact with humans, we first need to make sure that humans and robots understand one another. Diverse algorithms have been developed to enable robots to learn from humans (i.e., transferring information from…
Integrating multimodal foundation models has significantly enhanced autonomous agents' language comprehension, perception, and planning capabilities. However, while existing works adopt a \emph{task-centric} approach with minimal human…
Conversational AIs, or chatbots, mimic human speech when conversing. Smart assistants facilitate the automation of several tasks that needed human intervention earlier. Because of their accuracy, absence of dependence on human resources,…
Autonomous robot systems for applications from search and rescue to assistive guidance should be able to engage in natural language dialog with people. To study such cooperative communication, we introduce Robot Simultaneous Localization…
Enabling robots to autonomously navigate unknown, complex, and dynamic real-world environments presents several challenges, including imperfect perception, partial observability, localization uncertainty, and safety constraints. Current…
Humans are known to construct cognitive maps of their everyday surroundings using a variety of perceptual inputs. As such, when a human is asked for directions to a particular location, their wayfinding capability in converting this…
Collaboration between human and robot requires effective modes of communication to assign robot tasks and coordinate activities. As communication can utilize different modalities, a multi-modal approach can be more expressive than single…
People with lower and upper body disabilities can benefit from wheelchairs and robotic arms to improve mobility and independence. Prior assistive interfaces, such as touchscreens and voice-driven predefined commands, often remain…
Physically assistive robots present an opportunity to significantly increase the well-being and independence of individuals with motor impairments or other forms of disability who are unable to complete activities of daily living. Speech…
How human-like do conversational robots need to look to enable long-term human-robot conversation? One essential aspect of long-term interaction is a human's ability to adapt to the varying degrees of a conversational partner's engagement…
This paper tackles the challenging task of evaluating socially situated conversational robots and presents a novel objective evaluation approach that relies on multimodal user behaviors. In this study, our main focus is on assessing the…
This paper presents AI Guide Dog (AIGD), a lightweight egocentric (first-person) navigation system for visually impaired users, designed for real-time deployment on smartphones. AIGD employs a vision-only multi-label classification approach…
Notwithstanding the tremendous progress that is taking place in spoken language technology, effective speech-based human-robot interaction still raises a number of important challenges. Not only do the fields of robotics and spoken language…
Quadrupedal robots show great potential for valuable real-world applications such as fire rescue and industrial inspection. Such applications often require urgency and the ability to navigate agilely, which in turn demands the capability to…