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Ensuring safety for human-interactive robotics is important due to the potential for human injury. The key challenge is defining safety in a way that accounts for the complex range of human behaviors without modeling the human as an…
Accurate post-impact velocity predictions are essential in developing impact-aware manipulation strategies for robots, where contacts are intentionally established at non-zero speed mimicking human manipulation abilities in dynamic grasping…
The paper reports an empirical study of the effect of human treatment of a robot on the social perception of the robot's behavior. The study employed an enacted interaction between an anthropomorphic "waiter" robot and two customers. The…
Robots are required to autonomously respond to changing situations. Imitation learning is a promising candidate for achieving generalization performance, and extensive results have been demonstrated in object manipulation. However,…
Human-robot collaboration is on the rise. Robots need to increasingly improve the efficiency and smoothness with which they assist humans by properly anticipating a human's intention. To do so, prediction models need to increase their…
Human-robot object handover is a crucial element for assistive robots that aim to help people in their daily lives, including elderly care, hospitals, and factory floors. The existing approaches to solving these tasks rely on pre-selected…
Robots that physically interact with their surroundings, in order to accomplish some tasks or assist humans in their activities, require to exploit contact forces in a safe and proficient manner. Impedance control is considered as a…
Robots in shared spaces often move in ways that are difficult for people to interpret, placing the burden on humans to adapt. High-DoF robots exhibit motion that people read as expressive, intentionally or not, making it important to…
This paper investigates the specific scenario of high-intensity confrontations between humans and robots, to understand how robots can defuse the conflict. It focuses on the effectiveness of using five different affective expression…
Intentionally applying impacts while maintaining balance is challenging for legged robots. This study originated from observing experimental data of the humanoid robot HRP-4 intentionally hitting a wall with its right arm while standing on…
Reinforcement learning (RL) excels in applications such as video games, but ensuring safety as well as the ability to achieve the specified goals remains challenging when using RL for real-world problems, such as human-aligned tasks where…
Employing skin-like tactile sensors on robots enhances both the safety and usability of collaborative robots by adding the capability to detect human contact. Unfortunately, simple binary tactile sensors alone cannot determine the context…
The study of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) aims to create close and friendly communication between humans and robots. In the human-center HRI, an essential aspect of implementing a successful and effective HRI is building a natural and…
Safe yet stable grasping requires a robotic hand to apply sufficient force on the object to immobilize it while keeping it from getting damaged. Soft robotic hands have been proposed for safe grasping due to their passive compliance, but…
The use of social, anthropomorphic robots to support humans in various industries has been on the rise. During Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), physically interactive non-verbal behaviour is key for more natural interactions. Handshaking is…
Humans use semantic concepts such as spatial relations between objects to describe scenes and communicate tasks such as "Put the tea to the right of the cup" or "Move the plate between the fork and the spoon." Just as children, assistive…
As high-speed, agile robots become more commonplace, these robots will have the potential to better aid and collaborate with humans. However, due to the increased agility and functionality of these robots, close collaboration with humans…
Trust in automation, or more recently trust in autonomy, has received extensive research attention in the past two decades. The majority of prior literature adopted a "snapshot" view of trust and typically evaluated trust through…
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,…
Forthcoming applications concerning humanoid robots may involve physical interaction between the robot and a dynamic environment. In such scenario, classical balancing and walking controllers that neglect the environment dynamics may not be…