Related papers: SPARCS: Structuring Physically Assistive Robotics …

Robotic collectives for military and disaster response applications require coalition formation algorithms to partition robots into appropriate task teams. Collectives' missions will often incorporate tasks that require multiple high-level…

Social robots, also known as service or assistant robots, have been developed to improve the quality of human life in recent years. Socially assistive robots (SAR) are a special type of social robots that focus on providing support through…

In this paper, we present Stratified Topological Autonomy for Long-Range Coordination (STALC), a hierarchical planning approach for multi-robot coordination in real-world environments with significant inter-robot spatial and temporal…

Shared autonomy provides a framework where a human and an automated system, such as a robot, jointly control the system's behavior, enabling an effective solution for various applications, including human-robot interaction. However, a…

We present a hierarchical framework to solve robot planning as an input control problem. At the lowest level are temporary closed control loops, ("tasks"), each representing a behaviour, contingent on a specific sensory input and therefore…

This paper presents an open-source, lightweight, yet comprehensive software framework, named RPC, which integrates physics-based simulators, planning and control libraries, debugging tools, and a user-friendly operator interface. RPC…

Human feedback can greatly accelerate robot learning, but in real-world settings, such feedback is costly and limited. Existing human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning (HiL-RL) methods often assume abundant feedback, limiting their…

Assistive robotic systems have shown growing potential to improve the quality of life of those with disabilities. As researchers explore the automation of various caregiving tasks, considerations for how the technology can still preserve…

We introduce Vocal Sandbox, a framework for enabling seamless human-robot collaboration in situated environments. Systems in our framework are characterized by their ability to adapt and continually learn at multiple levels of abstraction…

Human-robot collaboration in surgery represents a significant area of research, driven by the increasing capability of autonomous robotic systems to assist surgeons in complex procedures. This systematic review examines the advancements and…

We introduce a taxonomy of important factors to consider when designing interactions with an assistive robot in a senior living facility. These factors are derived from our reflection on two field studies and are grouped into the following…

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…

Robot grasping of desktop object is widely used in intelligent manufacturing, logistics, and agriculture.Although vision-language models (VLMs) show strong potential for robotic manipulation, their deployment in low-level grasping faces key…

Autonomous robots can benefit greatly from human-provided semantic characterizations of uncertain task environments and states. However, the development of integrated strategies which let robots model, communicate, and act on such 'soft…

Robotics has made remarkable hardware strides-from DARPA's Urban and Robotics Challenges to the first humanoid-robot kickboxing tournament-yet commercial autonomy still lags behind progress in machine learning. A major bottleneck is…

The use of autonomous robots for assistance tasks in hospitals has the potential to free up qualified staff and im-prove patient care. However, the ubiquity of deformable and transparent objects in hospital settings poses signif-icant…

Remarkable capabilities have been achieved by robotics and AI, mastering complex tasks and environments. Yet, humans often remain passive observers, fascinated but uncertain how to engage. Robots, in turn, cannot reach their full potential…

In practical applications, the unpredictable movement of obstacles and the imprecise state observation of robots introduce significant uncertainties for the swarm of robots, especially in cluster environments. However, existing methods are…

The success of the human-robot co-worker team in a flexible manufacturing environment where robots learn from demonstration heavily relies on the correct and safe operation of the robot. How this can be achieved is a challenge that requires…

The CYCLOPS is a cable-driven parallel mechanism used for minimally invasive applications, with the ability to be customised to different surgical needs; allowing it to be made procedure- and patient-specific. For adequate optimisation,…