Related papers: Teaching Robots to Span the Space of Functional Ex…
Physical human-robot interaction can improve human ergonomics, task efficiency, and the flexibility of automation, but often requires application-specific methods to detect human state and determine robot response. At the same time, many…
Human emotions are expressed through multiple modalities, including verbal and non-verbal information. Moreover, the affective states of human users can be the indicator for the level of engagement and successful interaction, suitable for…
Human emotions are complex and can be conveyed through nuanced touch gestures. Previous research has primarily focused on how humans recognize emotions through touch or on identifying key features of emotional expression for robots.…
Our goal is to enable robots to express their incapability, and to do so in a way that communicates both what they are trying to accomplish and why they are unable to accomplish it. We frame this as a trajectory optimization problem:…
The facial expression generation capability of humanoid social robots is critical for achieving natural and human-like interactions, playing a vital role in enhancing the fluidity of human-robot interactions and the accuracy of emotional…
Socially assistive robots could help to support people's well-being in contexts such as art therapy where human therapists are scarce, by making art such as paintings together with people in a way that is emotionally contingent and…
We design a new approach that allows robot learning of new activities from unlabeled human example videos. Given videos of humans executing the same activity from a human's viewpoint (i.e., first-person videos), our objective is to make the…
Real-life robot navigation involves more than just reaching a destination; it requires optimizing movements while addressing scenario-specific goals. An intuitive way for humans to express these goals is through abstract cues like verbal…
Combining model-based and model-free deep reinforcement learning has shown great promise for improving sample efficiency on complex control tasks while still retaining high performance. Incorporating imagination is a recent effort in this…
While shared autonomy offers significant potential for assistive robotics, key questions remain about how to effectively map 2D control inputs to 6D robot motions. An intuitive framework should allow users to input commands effortlessly,…
Effective human-robot interaction, such as in robot learning from human demonstration, requires the learning agent to be able to ground abstract concepts (such as those contained within instructions) in a corresponding high-dimensional…
Service and assistive robots are increasingly being deployed in dynamic social environments; however, ensuring transparent and explainable interactions remains a significant challenge. This paper presents a multimodal explainability module…
Quadruped robots are currently used in industrial robotics as mechanical aid to automate several routine tasks. However, presently, the usage of such a robot in a domestic setting is still very much a part of the research. This paper…
Achieving social acceptance is one of the main goals of Social Robotic Navigation. Despite this topic has received increasing interest in recent years, most of the research has focused on driving the robotic agent along obstacle-free…
Human acceptance of social robots is greatly effected by empathy and perceived understanding. This necessitates accurate and flexible responses to various input data from the user. While systems such as this can become increasingly complex…
The emergence of vision catalysed a pivotal evolutionary advancement, enabling organisms not only to perceive but also to interact intelligently with their environment. This transformation is mirrored by the evolution of robotic systems,…
Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is a popular method of reproducing and generalizing robot skills from human-provided demonstrations. In this paper, we propose a novel optimization-based LfD method that encodes demonstrations as elastic…
The representation of the knowledge needed by a robot to perform complex tasks is restricted by the limitations of perception. One possible way of overcoming this situation and designing "knowledgeable" robots is to rely on the interaction…
Assistive robots enable people with disabilities to conduct everyday tasks on their own. However, these tasks can be complex, containing both coarse reaching motions and fine-grained manipulation. For example, when eating, not only does one…
Affective interaction is not merely about recognizing emotions; it is an embodied, situated process shaped by context and co-created through interaction. In affective computing, the role of haptic feedback within dynamic emotional exchanges…