Related papers: Exploiting Proximity-Aware Tasks for Embodied Soci…
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…
Shared autonomy provides an effective framework for human-robot collaboration that takes advantage of the complementary strengths of humans and robots to achieve common goals. Many existing approaches to shared autonomy make restrictive…
The research field of Embodied AI has witnessed substantial progress in visual navigation and exploration thanks to powerful simulating platforms and the availability of 3D data of indoor and photorealistic environments. These two factors…
Developing autonomous agents that quickly explore an environment and adapt their behavior online is a canonical challenge in robotics and machine learning. While humans are able to achieve such fast online exploration and adaptation, often…
In this paper, we present a planning framework that uses a combination of implicit (robot motion) and explicit (visual/audio/haptic feedback) communication during mobile robot navigation. First, we developed a model that approximates both…
Manipulation in confined and cluttered environments remains a significant challenge due to partial observability and complex configuration spaces. Effective manipulation in such environments requires an intelligent exploration strategy to…
In this paper, we propose a novel Deep Reinforcement Learning approach to address the mapless navigation problem, in which the locomotion actions of a humanoid robot are taken online based on the knowledge encoded in learned models.…
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…
As robots increasingly enter human-centered environments, they must not only be able to navigate safely around humans, but also adhere to complex social norms. Humans often rely on non-verbal communication through gestures and facial…
The success of collaboration between humans and robots in shared environments relies on the robot's real-time adaptation to human motion. Specifically, in Social Navigation, the agent should be close enough to assist but ready to back up to…
Mobility in an effective and socially-compliant manner is an essential yet challenging task for robots operating in crowded spaces. Recent works have shown the power of deep reinforcement learning techniques to learn socially cooperative…
Despite the progress in legged robotic locomotion, autonomous navigation in unknown environments remains an open problem. Ideally, the navigation system utilizes the full potential of the robots' locomotion capabilities while operating…
Realistic long-horizon tasks like image-goal navigation involve exploratory and exploitative phases. Assigned with an image of the goal, an embodied agent must explore to discover the goal, i.e., search efficiently using learned priors.…
Social navigation is the capability of an autonomous agent, such as a robot, to navigate in a 'socially compliant' manner in the presence of other intelligent agents such as humans. With the emergence of autonomously navigating mobile…
Navigation and manipulation are core capabilities in Embodied AI, yet training agents with these capabilities in the real world faces high costs and time complexity. Therefore, sim-to-real transfer has emerged as a key approach, yet the…
Embodied navigation that adheres to social norms remains an open research challenge. Our SocialNav is a foundational model for socially-aware navigation with a hierarchical "brain-action" architecture, capable of understanding high-level…
It has always been expected that a robot can be easily deployed to unknown scenarios, accomplishing robotic grasping tasks without human intervention. Nevertheless, existing grasp detection approaches are typically off-body techniques and…
The deployment of humanoid robots in unstructured, human-centric environments requires navigation capabilities that extend beyond simple locomotion to include robust perception, provable safety, and socially aware behavior. Current…
This paper presents the framework for a novel Unified Socially-Aware Navigation (USAN) architecture and explains its need in Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR) applications. Our approach emphasizes interpersonal distance and how spatial…
Physical embodiment is a required component for robots that are structurally coupled with their real-world environments. However, most socially interactive robots do not need to physically interact with their environments in order to…