Related papers: Robots: the Century Past and the Century Ahead

Robotic agents that share autonomy with a human should leverage human domain knowledge and account for their preferences when completing a task. This extra knowledge can dramatically improve plan efficiency and user-satisfaction, but these…

With the continuous breakthroughs in core technology, the dawn of large-scale integration of robotic systems into daily human life is on the horizon. Multi-robot systems (MRS) built on this foundation are undergoing drastic evolution. The…

Robotic systems are multi-dimensional entities, combining both hardware and software, that are heavily dependent on, and influenced by, interactions with the real world. They can be variously categorised as embedded, cyberphysical,…

Wearable robots are undergoing a disruptive transition, from the rigid machines that populated the science-fiction world in the early eighties to lightweight robotic apparel, hardly distinguishable from our daily clothes. In less than a…

Technological progress increasingly envisions the use of robots interacting with people in everyday life. Human-robot collaboration (HRC) is the approach that explores the interaction between a human and a robot, during the completion of a…

When humans interact with robots influence is inevitable. Consider an autonomous car driving near a human: the speed and steering of the autonomous car will affect how the human drives. Prior works have developed frameworks that enable…

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…

Despite the recent successes in robotics, artificial intelligence and computer vision, a complete artificial agent necessarily must include active perception. A multitude of ideas and methods for how to accomplish this have already appeared…

Relying on a large corpus of natural interactions between visitors and a robot in a museum setting, we study a recurrent practice through which humans "worked" to maintain the robot as a competent participant: the description by bystanders,…

Humans can leverage physical interaction to teach robot arms. This physical interaction takes multiple forms depending on the task, the user, and what the robot has learned so far. State-of-the-art approaches focus on learning from a single…

As robotic technologies evolve, their potential in artistic creation becomes an increasingly relevant topic of inquiry. This study explores how professional abstract artists perceive and experience co-creative interactions with an…

The Robadom project aims at creating a homecare robot that help and assist people in their daily life, either in doing task for the human or in managing day organization. A robot could have this kind of role only if it is accepted by…

Classical robot ethics is often framed around obedience, including Asimov's laws. This framing is insufficient for contemporary AI systems, which are increasingly adaptive, generative, embodied, and embedded in physical, psychological, and…

An important tradition in philosophy holds that in order to successfully perform a joint action, the participants must be capable of establishing commitments on joint goals and shared plans. This suggests that social robotics should endow…

This paper introduces our approach to building a robot with communication capability based on the two key features: stochastic neural dynamics and prediction error minimization (PEM). A preliminary experiment with humanoid robots showed…

Robot assistants for older adults and people with disabilities need to interact with their users in collaborative tasks. The core component of these systems is an interaction manager whose job is to observe and assess the task, and infer…

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…

Robustness is key to engineering, automation, and science as a whole. However, the property of robustness is often underpinned by costly requirements such as over-provisioning, known uncertainty and predictive models, and known adversaries.…

We consider problems in which robots conspire to present a view of the world that differs from reality. The inquiry is motivated by the problem of validating robot behavior physically despite there being a discrepancy between the robots we…

Our lives have been immensely improved by decades of automation research -- we are more comfortable, more productive and safer than ever before. Just imagine a world where familiar automation technologies have failed. In that world,…