Related papers: Can Quadruped Navigation Robots be Used as Guide D…
Autonomous mobile robots need to perceive the environments with their onboard sensors (e.g., LiDARs and RGB cameras) and then make appropriate navigation decisions. In order to navigate human-inhabited public spaces, such a navigation task…
Blind and low-vision (BLV) people rely on GPS-based systems for outdoor navigation. GPS's inaccuracy, however, causes them to veer off track, run into obstacles, and struggle to reach precise destinations. While prior work has made precise…
We exploit the complementary strengths of vision and proprioception to develop a point-goal navigation system for legged robots, called VP-Nav. Legged systems are capable of traversing more complex terrain than wheeled robots, but to fully…
This paper investigates the potential of vision-language models (VLMs) to assist people with blindness and low vision (pBLV) in navigation tasks. We evaluate state-of-the-art closed-source models, including GPT-4V, GPT-4o, Gemini-1.5-Pro,…
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) empowers agents to associate time-sequenced visual observations with corresponding instructions to make sequential decisions. However, generalization remains a persistent challenge, particularly when…
This is a summary paper of a use case of a Robotdog dedicated to guide visually impaired people in complex environment like a smart intersection. In such scenarios, the Robotdog has to autonomously decide whether it is safe to cross the…
Legged locomotion holds the premise of universal mobility, a critical capability for many real-world robotic applications. Both model-based and learning-based approaches have advanced the field of legged locomotion in the past three…
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) demonstrate a promising direction for assisting individuals with blindness or low-vision (BLV). Yet, measuring their true utility in real-world scenarios is challenging because evaluating whether their…
Mobile telepresence robots (MTRs) have become increasingly popular in the expanding world of remote work, providing new avenues for people to actively participate in activities at a distance. However, humans operating MTRs often have…
Social robots, also known as service or assistant robots, have been developed to improve the quality of human life in recent years. The design of socially capable and intelligent robots can vary, depending on the target user groups. In this…
Deep learning methods have revolutionized mobile robotics, from advanced perception models for an enhanced situational awareness to novel control approaches through reinforcement learning. This paper explores the potential of federated…
A single mobile service robot may generate hundreds of encounters with pedestrians, yet there is little published data on the factors influencing these incidental human-robot encounters. We report the results of a between-subjects…
Legged robots are increasingly entering new domains and applications, including search and rescue, inspection, and logistics. However, for such systems to be valuable in real-world scenarios, they must be able to autonomously and robustly…
We present Visual Navigation and Locomotion over obstacles (ViNL), which enables a quadrupedal robot to navigate unseen apartments while stepping over small obstacles that lie in its path (e.g., shoes, toys, cables), similar to how humans…
Mobile robot navigation is typically regarded as a geometric problem, in which the robot's objective is to perceive the geometry of the environment in order to plan collision-free paths towards a desired goal. However, a purely geometric…
Purpose of Review: As new technological advancements are made, humanoid robots that utilise them are being designed and manufactured. For optimal design choices, a broad overview with insight on the advantages and disadvantages of available…
Legged robots have the potential to become vital in maintenance, home support, and exploration scenarios. In order to interact with and manipulate their environments, most legged robots are equipped with a dedicated robot arm, which means…
The enhanced mobility brought by legged locomotion empowers quadrupedal robots to navigate through complex and unstructured environments. However, optimizing agile locomotion while accounting for the varying energy costs of traversing…
Designing agile locomotion for quadruped robots often requires extensive expertise and tedious manual tuning. In this paper, we present a system to automate this process by leveraging deep reinforcement learning techniques. Our system can…
Traversing 3-D complex environments has always been a significant challenge for legged locomotion. Existing methods typically rely on external sensors such as vision and lidar to preemptively react to obstacles by acquiring environmental…