Related papers: Balancing Efficiency and Comfort in Robot-Assisted…

Mechanizing the manual harvesting of fresh market fruits constitutes one of the biggest challenges to the sustainability of the fruit industry. During manual harvesting of some fresh-market crops like strawberries and table grapes, pickers…

Behavior Trees constitute a widespread AI tool which has been successfully spun out in robotics. Their advantages include simplicity, modularity, and reusability of code. However, Behavior Trees remain a high-level decision making engine;…

When performing manipulation-based activities such as picking objects, a mobile robot needs to position its base at a location that supports successful execution. To address this problem, prominent approaches typically rely on costly grasp…

Intelligent manufacturing is becoming increasingly important due to the growing demand for maximizing productivity and flexibility while minimizing waste and lead times. This work investigates automated secondary robotic food packaging…

Robots can serve as safety catalysts on construction job sites by taking over hazardous and repetitive tasks while alleviating the risks associated with existing manual workflows. Research on the safety of physical human-robot interaction…

Robotic grasping in cluttered environments is often infeasible due to obstacles preventing possible grasps. Then, pre-grasping manipulation like shifting or pushing an object becomes necessary. We developed an algorithm that can learn, in…

Real-world robotic tasks require complex reward functions. When we define the problem the robot needs to solve, we pretend that a designer specifies this complex reward exactly, and it is set in stone from then on. In practice, however,…

We focus on the task of object manipulation to an arbitrary goal pose, in which a robot is supposed to pick an assigned object to place at the goal position with a specific orientation. However, limited by the execution space of the…

Understanding and respecting personal space preferences is essential for socially assistive robots designed for older adult users. This work introduces and evaluates a novel personalized context-aware method for modeling users' proxemics…

Robust and efficient learning remains a challenging problem in robotics, in particular with complex visual inputs. Inspired by human attention mechanism, with which we quickly process complex visual scenes and react to changes in the…

In this paper, we consider the problem of designing collision-free, dynamically feasible, and socially-aware trajectories for robots operating in environments populated by humans. We define trajectories to be social-aware if they do not…

Taking inspiration from the natural gait transition mechanism of quadrupeds, devising a good gait transition strategy is important for quadruped robots to achieve energy-efficient locomotion on various terrains and velocities. While…

Bio-hybrid systems---close couplings of natural organisms with technology---are high potential and still underexplored. In existing work, robots have mostly influenced group behaviors of animals. We explore the possibilities of mixing…

To facilitate human--robot interaction (HRI) tasks in real-world scenarios, service robots must adapt to dynamic environments and understand the required tasks while effectively communicating with humans. To accomplish HRI in practice, we…

Safely deploying robots in uncertain and dynamic environments requires a systematic accounting of various risks, both within and across layers in an autonomy stack from perception to motion planning and control. Many widely used motion…

This paper develops intelligent algorithms for robots to reorient objects. Given the initial and goal poses of an object, the proposed algorithms plan a sequence of robot poses and grasp configurations that reorient the object from its…

Cooking robots can enhance the home experience by reducing the burden of daily chores. However, these robots must perform their tasks dexterously and safely in shared human environments, especially when handling dangerous tools such as…

This paper describes a study to test the accuracy of a method that tracks wrist motion during eating to detect and count bites. The purpose was to assess its accuracy across demographic (age, gender, ethnicity) and bite (utensil, container,…

The ability for robots to transfer their learned knowledge to new tasks -- where data is scarce -- is a fundamental challenge for successful robot learning. While fine-tuning has been well-studied as a simple but effective transfer approach…

In this preliminary study, we investigate changes in handover behaviour when transferring hazardous objects with the help of a high-resolution touch sensor. Participants were asked to hand over a safe and hazardous object (a full cup and an…