Related papers: Using Virtual Reality to Simulate Human-Robot Emer…

To cooperate with humans effectively, virtual agents need to be able to understand and execute language instructions. A typical setup to achieve this is with a scripted teacher which guides a virtual agent using language instructions.…

Virtual Reality (VR) for Serious Games (SGs) is attracting increasing attention for training applications due to its potential to provide significantly enhanced learning to users. Some examples of the application of VR for SGs are complex…

This paper studies the problem of robot performance evaluation, focusing on how to obtain accurate and efficient estimates of real-world behavior under severe constraints on physical experimentation. Such estimates are essential for…

In the context of autonomous navigation, effectively conveying abstract navigational cues to agents in dynamic environments presents significant challenges, particularly when navigation information is derived from diverse modalities such as…

Human-guided robotic exploration is a useful approach to gathering information at remote locations, especially those that might be too risky, inhospitable, or inaccessible for humans. Maintaining common ground between the remotely-located…

Fires, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, overcrowding, or and even pandemic viruses endanger human lives. Hence, designing infrastructures to handle possible emergencies has become an ever-increasing need. The safe evacuation of occupants…

This paper presents a pilot study exploring the effects of an olfactory stimulus (smoke) for a Virtual Reality game designed to support wildfire evacuation preparedness. Participants (N=18) were split evenly into either a smoke or a control…

We study the challenging problem of releasing a robot in a previously unseen environment, and having it follow unconstrained natural language navigation instructions. Recent work on the task of Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) has…

We present a novel human-aware navigation approach, where the robot learns to mimic humans to navigate safely in crowds. The presented model, referred to as DeepMoTIon, is trained with pedestrian surveillance data to predict human velocity…

As intelligent agents transition from controlled to uncontrolled environments, they face challenges that sometimes exceed their operational capabilities. In many scenarios, they rely on assistance from bystanders to overcome those…

Autonomous vehicle (AV) algorithms need to be tested extensively in order to make sure the vehicle and the passengers will be safe while using it after the implementation. Testing these algorithms in real world create another important…

In an era marked by renewed interest in lunar exploration and the prospect of establishing a sustainable human presence on the Moon, innovative approaches supporting mission preparation and astronaut training are imperative. To this end,…

Evacuation of robots from a disk has attained a lot of attention recently. We visit the problem from the perspective of fault-tolerance. We consider two robots trying to evacuate from a disk via a single hidden exit on the perimeter of the…

Earthquakes, fire, and floods often cause structural collapses of buildings. The inspection of damaged buildings poses a high risk for emergency forces or is even impossible, though. We present three recent selected missions of the Robotics…

Virtual reality (VR) is known to cause a "time compression" effect, where the time spent in VR feels to pass faster than the effective elapsed time. Our goal with this research is to investigate if the physical realism of a VR experience…

Evacuation plans have been historically used as a safety measure for the construction of buildings. The existing crowd simulators require fully-modeled 3D environments and enough time to prepare and simulate scenarios, where the…

Collaborative robots (cobots) increasingly operate alongside humans, demanding robust real-time safeguarding. Current safety standards (e.g., ISO 10218, ANSI/RIA 15.06, ISO/TS 15066) require risk assessments but offer limited guidance for…

The aim our work is to create virtual humans as intelligent entities, which includes approximate the maximum as possible the virtual agent animation to the natural human behavior. In order to accomplish this task, our agent must be capable…

Despite recent advancement in virtual reality technology, teleoperating a high DoF robot to complete dexterous tasks in cluttered scenes remains difficult. In this work, we propose a system that allows the user to teleoperate a Fetch robot…

Virtual reality has proved to be useful in applications in several fields ranging from gaming, medicine, and training to development of interfaces that enable human-robot collaboration. It empowers designers to explore applications outside…