Related papers: Unfreezing Social Navigation: Dynamical Systems ba…

Human-robot interaction frequently involves physical proximity or contact. In human-human settings, people flexibly accept, reject, or tolerate such approaches depending on the relationship and context. We explore the design of a robot's…

This paper considers a scenario where a robot and a human operator share the same workspace, and the robot is able to both carry out autonomous tasks and physically interact with the human in order to achieve common goals. In this context,…

This paper presents a closed-form approach to constrain a flow within a given volume and around objects. The flow is guaranteed to converge and to stop at a single fixed point. We show that the obstacle avoidance problem can be inverted to…

Robots must make and break contact with the environment to perform useful tasks, but planning and control through contact remains a formidable challenge. In this work, we achieve real-time contact-implicit model predictive control with a…

In the rapidly evolving landscape of autonomous mobile robots, the emphasis on seamless human-robot interactions has shifted towards autonomous decision-making. This paper delves into the intricate challenges associated with robotic…

The successful implementation of Physical Human-Robot Interaction in industrial environments depends on ensuring safe collaboration between human operators and robotic devices. This necessitates the adoption of measures that guarantee the…

Complex robotic systems require whole-body controllers to deal with contact interactions, handle closed kinematic chains, and track task-space control objectives. However, for many applications, safety-critical controllers are important to…

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods for social robot navigation show great success navigating robots through large crowds of people, but the performance of these learning-based methods tends to degrade in particularly challenging or…

As autonomous vehicles (AVs) inch closer to reality, a central requirement for acceptance will be earning the trust of humans in everyday driving situations. In particular, the interaction between AVs and pedestrians is of high importance,…

Socially compliant navigation is an integral part of safety features in Human-Robot Interaction. Traditional approaches to mobile navigation prioritize physical aspects, such as efficiency, but social behaviors gain traction as robots…

Autonomous service robots share social spaces with humans, usually working together for domestic or professional tasks. Cyber security breaches in such robots undermine the trust between humans and robots. In this paper, we investigate how…

Navigating safely through dense crowds requires collision avoidance that generalizes beyond the densities seen during training. Learning-based crowd navigation can break under out-of-distribution crowd sizes due to density-sensitive…

In this paper, we propose a safety-critical controller based on time-varying control barrier functions (CBFs) for a robot with an unicycle model in the continuous-time domain to achieve navigation and dynamic collision avoidance. Unlike…

We present a model predictive controller (MPC) that automatically discovers collision-free locomotion while simultaneously taking into account the system dynamics, friction constraints, and kinematic limitations. A relaxed barrier function…

Verifying the correct behavior of robots in contact tasks is challenging due to model uncertainties associated with contacts. Standard methods for testing often fall short since all (uncountable many) solutions cannot be obtained. Instead,…

Collision-free mobile robot navigation is an important problem for many robotics applications, especially in cluttered environments. In such environments, obstacles can be static or dynamic. Dynamic obstacles can additionally be…

Navigating robots safely and efficiently in crowded and complex environments remains a significant challenge. However, due to the dynamic and intricate nature of these settings, planning efficient and collision-free paths for robots to…

Navigation and motion control of a robot to a destination are tasks that have historically been performed with the assumption that contact with the environment is harmful. This makes sense for rigid-bodied robots where obstacle collisions…

We present an approach to ensure safe and deadlock-free navigation for decentralized multi-robot systems operating in constrained environments, including doorways and intersections. Although many solutions have been proposed that ensure…

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…