Related papers: Testing Robot System Safety by creating Hazardous …
Safety is a fundamental requirement in any human-robot collaboration scenario. To ensure the safety of users for such scenarios, we propose a novel Virtual Barrier system facilitated by an augmented reality interface. Our system provides…
Robots will increasingly operate near humans that introduce uncertainties in the motion planning problem due to their complex nature. Typically, chance constraints are introduced in the planner to optimize performance while guaranteeing…
An outstanding challenge for the widespread deployment of robotic systems like autonomous vehicles is ensuring safe interaction with humans without sacrificing performance. Existing safety methods often neglect the robot's ability to learn…
The role of robots is expanding from tool to collaborator. Socially assistive robots (SARs) are an example of collaborative robots that assist humans in the real world. As robots enter our social sphere, unforeseen risks occur during…
Safety in human-robot interaction can be divided into physical safety and perceived safety, where the latter is still under-addressed in the literature. Investigating perceived safety in human-robot interaction requires a multidisciplinary…
Policy search reinforcement learning allows robots to acquire skills by themselves. However, the learning procedure is inherently unsafe as the robot has no a-priori way to predict the consequences of the exploratory actions it takes.…
Systems engineering approaches use high-level models to capture the architecture and behavior of the system. However, when safety engineers conduct safety and reliability analysis, they have to create formal models, such as fault-trees,…
As humans move toward collaborating with coordinated robot teams, understanding how these teams coordinate and fail is essential for building trust and ensuring safety. However, exposing human collaborators to coordination failures during…
In order to collaborate safely and efficiently, robots need to anticipate how their human partners will behave. Some of today's robots model humans as if they were also robots, and assume users are always optimal. Other robots account for…
As robots become increasingly prominent in diverse industrial settings, the desire for an accessible and reliable system has correspondingly increased. Yet, the task of meaningfully assessing the feasibility of introducing a new robotic…
We propose a framework for vision-based human pose estimation and motion prediction that gives conformal prediction guarantees for certifiably safe human-robot collaboration. Our framework combines aleatoric uncertainty estimation with OOD…
This paper discuss the integration of risk into a robot control framework for decommissioning applications in the nuclear industry. Our overall objective is to allow the robot to evaluate a risk associated with several methods of completing…
Robust motion planning is a well-studied problem in the robotics literature, yet current algorithms struggle to operate scalably and safely in the presence of other moving agents, such as humans. This paper introduces a novel framework for…
Robots will bring search and rescue (SaR) in disaster response to another level, in case they can autonomously take over dangerous SaR tasks from humans. A main challenge for autonomous SaR robots is to safely navigate in cluttered…
Autonomous Robotics Systems are inherently safety-critical and have complex safety issues to consider (for example, a safety failure can lead to a safety failure). Before they are deployed, these systems of have to show evidence that they…
Uncertainties in the real world mean that is impossible for system designers to anticipate and explicitly design for all scenarios that a robot might encounter. Thus, robots designed like this are fragile and fail outside of…
In human-robot collaboration, robot errors are inevitable -- damaging user trust, willingness to work together, and task performance. Prior work has shown that people naturally respond to robot errors socially and that in social…
As robots enter the messy human world so the vital matter of safety takes on a fresh complexion with physical contact becoming inevitable and even desirable. We report on an artistic-exploration of how dancers, working as part of a…
Robotic and embodied-AI systems have the potential to improve accessibility and quality of care in clinical settings, but their deployment in close physical contact with vulnerable patients introduces significant safety risks. This paper…
Robot accidents are inevitable. Although rare, they have been happening since assembly-line robots were first introduced in the 1960s. But a new generation of social robots are now becoming commonplace. Often with sophisticated embedded…