Related papers: Collective Intelligence for 2D Push Manipulations …
We present progress on the problem of reconfiguring a 2D arrangement of building material by a cooperative group of robots. These robots must avoid collisions, deadlocks, and are subjected to the constraint of maintaining connectivity of…
For robotic vehicles to navigate safely and efficiently in pedestrian-rich environments, it is important to model subtle human behaviors and navigation rules (e.g., passing on the right). However, while instinctive to humans, socially…
Enabling robots to autonomously perform hybrid motions in diverse environments can be beneficial for long-horizon tasks such as material handling, household chores, and work assistance. This requires extensive exploitation of intrinsic…
Mobile robots navigating in crowds trained using reinforcement learning are known to suffer performance degradation when faced with out-of-distribution scenarios. We propose that by properly accounting for the uncertainties of pedestrians,…
In disaster response or surveillance operations, quickly identifying areas needing urgent attention is critical, but deploying response teams to every location is inefficient or often impossible. Effective performance in this domain…
With the introduction of collaborative robots, humans and robots can now work together in close proximity and share the same workspace. However, this collaboration presents various challenges that need to be addressed to ensure seamless…
Human-aware robot navigation promises a range of applications in which mobile robots bring versatile assistance to people in common human environments. While prior research has mostly focused on modeling pedestrians as independent,…
Humans engaged in collaborative activities are naturally able to convey their intentions to teammates through multi-modal communication, which is made up of explicit and implicit cues. Similarly, a more natural form of human-robot…
We investigate pneumatic non-prehensile manipulation (i.e., blowing) as a means of efficiently moving scattered objects into a target receptacle. Due to the chaotic nature of aerodynamic forces, a blowing controller must (i) continually…
Intelligent robots need to generate and execute plans. In order to deal with the complexity of real environments, planning makes some assumptions about the world. When executing plans, the assumptions are usually not met. Most works have…
The development of collective-aware multi-robot systems is crucial for enhancing the efficiency and robustness of robotic applications in multiple fields. These systems enable collaboration, coordination, and resource sharing among robots,…
Use of physics-based simulation as a planning model enables a planner to reason and generate plans that involve non-trivial interactions with the world. For example, grasping a milk container out of a cluttered refrigerator may involve…
Sampling-based motion planners have experienced much success due to their ability to efficiently and evenly explore the state space. However, for many tasks, it may be more efficient to not uniformly explore the state space, especially when…
Learning complex manipulation tasks in realistic, obstructed environments is a challenging problem due to hard exploration in the presence of obstacles and high-dimensional visual observations. Prior work tackles the exploration problem by…
Robots that navigate among pedestrians use collision avoidance algorithms to enable safe and efficient operation. Recent works present deep reinforcement learning as a framework to model the complex interactions and cooperation. However,…
Deploying robots in open-ended unstructured environments such as homes has been a long-standing research problem. However, robots are often studied only in closed-off lab settings, and prior mobile manipulation work is restricted to…
We present a method for the control of robot swarms using two subsets of robots: a larger group of simple, oblivious robots (which we call the workers) that is governed by simple local attraction forces, and a smaller group (the guides)…
Increasing interest in integrating advanced robotics within manufacturing has spurred a renewed concentration in developing real-time scheduling solutions to coordinate human-robot collaboration in this environment. Traditionally, the…
Swarm robotics is a study of simple robots that exhibit complex behaviour only by interacting locally with other robots and their environment. The control in swarm robotics is mainly distributed whereas centralised control is widely used in…
We consider the problem of indoor building-scale social navigation, where the robot must reach a point goal as quickly as possible without colliding with humans who are freely moving around. Factors such as varying crowd densities,…