Related papers: Balancing Efficiency and Comfort in Robot-Assisted…
This paper explores general multi-robot task and motion planning, where multiple robots in close proximity manipulate objects while satisfying constraints and a given goal. In particular, we formulate the plan refinement problem--which,…
Path planning in robotics often requires finding high-quality solutions to continuously valued and/or high-dimensional problems. These problems are challenging and most planning algorithms instead solve simplified approximations. Popular…
This work introduces our approach to the flat and textureless object grasping problem. In particular, we address the tableware and cutlery manipulation problem where a service robot has to clean up a table. Our solution integrates colour…
Assistive robot arms can help humans by partially automating their desired tasks. Consider an adult with motor impairments controlling an assistive robot arm to eat dinner. The robot can reduce the number of human inputs -- and how precise…
Assistive robot arms have the potential to help disabled or elderly adults eat everyday meals without relying on a caregiver. To provide meaningful assistance, these robots must reach for food items, pick them up, and then carry them to the…
In socially assistive robotics, an important research area is the development of adaptation techniques and their effect on human-robot interaction. We present a meta-learning based policy gradient method for addressing the problem of…
Ensuring human safety in collaborative robotics can compromise efficiency because traditional safety measures increase robot cycle time when human interaction is frequent. This paper proposes a safety-aware approach to mitigate efficiency…
Receiving a hug is one of the best ways to feel socially supported, and the lack of social touch can have severe negative effects on an individual's well-being. Based on previous research both within and outside of HRI, we propose six…
Reasoning about object handover configurations allows an assistive agent to estimate the appropriateness of handover for a receiver with different arm mobility capacities. While there are existing approaches for estimating the effectiveness…
Humans seamlessly fuse anticipatory planning with immediate feedback to perform successive mobile manipulation tasks without stopping, achieving both high efficiency and reliability. Replicating this fluid and reliable behavior in robots…
Effective and fluent close-proximity human-robot interaction requires understanding how humans get habituated to robots and how robot motion affects human comfort. While prior work has identified humans' preferences over robot motion…
The Industry 4.0 paradigm promises shorter development times, increased ergonomy, higher flexibility, and resource efficiency in manufacturing environments. Collaborative robots are an important tangible technology for implementing such a…
The robotic handling of compliant and deformable food raw materials, characterized by high biological variation, complex geometrical 3D shapes, and mechanical structures and texture, is currently in huge demand in the ocean space,…
As technology advances, the barriers between the co-existence of humans and robots are slowly coming down. The prominence of physical interactions for collaboration and cooperation between humans and robots will be an undeniable fact.…
This work studies rearrangement problems involving the sorting of robots or objects in stack-like containers, which can be accessed only from one side. Two scenarios are considered: one where every robot or object needs to reach a…
With the rapid development of embodied intelligence, leveraging large-scale human data for high-level imitation learning on humanoid robots has become a focal point of interest in both academia and industry. However, applying humanoid…
Practical bipedal robot locomotion needs to be both energy efficient and robust to variability and uncertainty. In this paper, we build upon recent works in trajectory optimization for robot locomotion with two primary goals. First, we wish…
Collaborative space robots are an emerging technology with high impact as robots facilitate servicing functions in collaboration with astronauts with higher precision during lengthy tasks, under tight operational schedules, with less risk…
Automation applications are pushing the deployment of many high DoF manipulators in warehouse and manufacturing environments. This has motivated many efforts on optimizing manipulation tasks involving a single arm. Coordinating multiple…
We investigate the problem of multi-robot coordinated planning in environments where the robots may have to operate in close proximity to each other. We seek computationally efficient planners that ensure safe paths and adherence to…