Related papers: Robots: the Century Past and the Century Ahead
Robotic process automation (RPA) is a lightweight approach to automating business processes using software robots that emulate user actions at the graphical user interface level. While RPA has gained popularity for its cost-effective and…
Robot manipulation is an important part of human-robot interaction technology. However, traditional pre-programmed methods can only accomplish simple and repetitive tasks. To enable effective communication between robots and humans, and to…
Automating biological experimentation remains challenging due to the need for millimeter-scale precision, long and multi-step experiments, and the dynamic nature of living systems. Current liquid handlers only partially automate workflows,…
Current artificial intelligence systems show near-human-level capabilities when deployed in isolation. Systems of a few collaborating intelligent agents are being engineered to perform tasks collectively. This raises the question of whether…
Positive human-perception of robots is critical to achieving sustained use of robots in shared environments. One key factor affecting human-perception of robots are their sounds, especially the consequential sounds which robots (as…
When operating in service of people, robots need to optimize rewards aligned with end-user preferences. Since robots will rely on raw perceptual inputs like RGB images, their rewards will inevitably use visual representations. Recently…
As robotic technology advances, the barriers to the coexistence of humans and robots are slowly coming down. Application domains like elderly care, collaborative manufacturing, collaborative manipulation, etc., are considered the need of…
Smartphones and robots can have an adversarial or a symbiotic relationship because they strive to serve overlapping customer needs. While smartphones are prevalent, humanoid robots are not. Even though considerable public and private…
Embodied robots which can interact with their environment and neighbours are increasingly being used as a test case to develop Artificial Intelligence. This creates a need for multimodal robot controllers that can operate across different…
Safe human-robot interactions require robots to be able to learn how to behave appropriately in \sout{humans' world} \rev{spaces populated by people} and thus to cope with the challenges posed by our dynamic and unstructured environment,…
This paper investigates the concept of Labour as an expression of `timenergy' - a fusion of time and energy - and its entanglement within the system of Capital. We define Labour as the commodified, quantifiable expansion of timenergy, in…
We humans are biased - and our robotic creations are biased, too. Bias is a natural phenomenon that drives our perceptions and behavior, including when it comes to socially expressive robots that have humanlike features. Recognizing that we…
Robots can learn from humans by asking questions. In these questions the robot demonstrates a few different behaviors and asks the human for their favorite. But how should robots choose which questions to ask? Today's robots optimize for…
This note is a sketch of how the concept of robopsychology and robophilosophy could be reinterpreted and repositioned in the spirit of the original vocation of psychology and philosophy. The notion of the robopsychology as a fictional…
Studying Human-Robot Interaction over time can provide insights into what really happens when a robot becomes part of people's everyday lives. "In the Wild" studies inform the design of social robots, such as for the service industry, to…
A large body of compelling evidence has been accumulated demonstrating that embodiment - the agent's physical setup, including its shape, materials, sensors and actuators - is constitutive for any form of cognition and as a consequence,…
The field of social robotics will likely need to depart from a paradigm of designed behaviours and imitation learning and adopt modern reinforcement learning (RL) methods to enable robots to interact fluidly and efficaciously with humans.…
In evolutionary robotics, jointly optimising the design and the controller of robots is a challenging task due to the huge complexity of the solution space formed by the possible combinations of body and controller. We focus on the…
Handing objects to humans is an essential capability for collaborative robots. Previous research works on human-robot handovers focus on facilitating the performance of the human partner and possibly minimising the physical effort needed to…
This paper presents a new technique to control highly redundant mechanical systems, such as humanoid robots. We take inspiration from two approaches. Prioritized control is a widespread multi-task technique in robotics and animation: tasks…