Related papers: Human-Robot Commensality: Bite Timing Prediction f…
We demonstrate a robot-assisted feeding system that enables people with mobility impairments to feed themselves. Our system design embodies Safety, Portability, and User Control, with comprehensive full-stack safety checks, the ability to…
Millions of people around the world need assistance with feeding. Robotic feeding systems offer the potential to enhance autonomy and quality of life for individuals with impairments and reduce caregiver workload. However, their widespread…
Robot-assisted feeding in household environments is challenging because it requires robots to generate trajectories that effectively bring food items of varying shapes and sizes into the mouth while making sure the user is comfortable. Our…
Robot-assisted feeding can greatly enhance the lives of those with mobility limitations. Modern feeding systems can pick up and position food in front of a care recipient's mouth for a bite. However, many with severe mobility constraints…
Robot-assisted feeding enables people with disabilities who require assistance eating to enjoy a meal independently and with dignity. However, existing systems have only been tested in-lab or in-home, leaving in-the-wild social dining…
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…
Socially aware robot navigation is a planning paradigm where the robot navigates in human environments and tries to adhere to social constraints while interacting with the humans in the scene. These navigation strategies were further…
As social beings, much human behavior is predicated on social context - the ambient social state that includes cultural norms, social signals, individual preferences, etc. In this paper, we propose a socially-aware task and motion planning…
Autonomous feeding is challenging because it requires manipulation of food items with various compliance, sizes, and shapes. To understand how humans manipulate food items during feeding and to explore ways to adapt their strategies to…
Humans are well-adept at navigating public spaces shared with others, where current autonomous mobile robots still struggle: while safely and efficiently reaching their goals, humans communicate their intentions and conform to unwritten…
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…
Robots are increasingly working alongside people, delivering food to patrons in restaurants or helping workers on assembly lines. These scenarios often involve object handovers between the person and the robot. To achieve safe and efficient…
For effective human-robot collaboration, a robot must align its actions with human goals, even as they change mid-task. Prior approaches often assume fixed goals, reducing goal prediction to a one-time inference. However, in real-world…
While there are many examples in which robots provide social assistance, a lack of theory on how the robots should decide how to assist impedes progress in realizing these technologies. To address this deficiency, we propose a pair of…
As social service robots become commonplace, it is essential for them to effectively interpret human signals, such as verbal, gesture, and eye gaze, when people need to focus on their primary tasks to minimize interruptions and…
Robot-assisted bite acquisition involves picking up food items with varying shapes, compliance, sizes, and textures. Fully autonomous strategies may not generalize efficiently across this diversity. We propose leveraging feedback from the…
Understanding social signals in multi-party conversations is important for human-robot interaction and artificial social intelligence. Social signals include body pose, head pose, speech, and context-specific activities like acquiring and…
When robots entered our day-to-day life, the shared space surrounding humans and robots is critical for effective Human-Robot collaboration. The design of shared space should satisfy humans' preferences and robots' efficiency. This work…
Wheelchair-mounted robotic arms (and other assistive robots) should help their users perform everyday tasks. One way robots can provide this assistance is shared autonomy. Within shared autonomy, both the human and robot maintain control…
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…