Related papers: Lessons from Robot-Assisted Disaster Response Depl…
The recent coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the many challenges faced by the healthcare, public safety, and economic systems when confronted with a surge in patients that require intensive treatment and a population that must be…
The inspection of confined critical infrastructure such as attics or crawlspaces is challenging for human operators due to insufficient task space, limited visibility, and the presence of hazardous materials. This paper introduces a…
Developing a rapid, but also reliable and efficient, method for classifying the seismic damage potential of buildings constructed in countries with regions of high seismicity is always at the forefront of modern scientific research. Such a…
In all types of disasters, from earthquakes to armed conflicts, aid workers need accurate and timely data such as damage to buildings and population displacement to mount an effective response. Remote sensing provides this data at an…
Urban searches demand rapid, defensible decisions and sustained physical effort under high cognitive and situational load. Incident commanders must plan, coordinate, and document time-critical operations, while field searchers execute…
Robots in real-world environments continuously engage with multiple users and encounter changes that lead to unexpected conflicts in fulfilling user requests. Recent technical advancements (e.g., large-language models (LLMs), program…
Collaboration between human supervisors and remote teams of robots is highly challenging, particularly in high-stakes, distant, hazardous locations, such as off-shore energy platforms. In order for these teams of robots to truly be…
In human-robot collaboration, robot errors are inevitable -- damaging user trust, willingness to work together, and task performance. Prior work has shown that people naturally respond to robot errors socially and that in social…
Air-ground collaborative robots have shown great potential in the field of fire and rescue, which can quickly respond to rescue needs and improve the efficiency of task execution. Mapping and navigation, as the key foundation for air-ground…
While assistive robots have much potential to help older people with frailty-related needs, there are few in use. There is a gap between what is developed in laboratories and what would be viable in real-world contexts. Through a series of…
Despite significant improvements in robot capabilities, they are likely to fail in human-robot collaborative tasks due to high unpredictability in human environments and varying human expectations. In this work, we explore the role of…
Reinforcement learning and probabilistic reasoning algorithms aim at learning from interaction experiences and reasoning with probabilistic contextual knowledge respectively. In this research, we develop algorithms for robot task…
Autonomous or teleoperated robots have been playing increasingly important roles in civil applications in recent years. Across the different civil domains where robots can support human operators, one of the areas where they can have more…
Multi-robot systems are increasingly being used for critical applications such as rescuing injured people, delivering food and medicines, and monitoring key areas. These applications usually involve navigating at high speeds through…
There has been a plethora of work towards improving robot perception and navigation, yet their application in hazardous environments, like during a fire or an earthquake, is still at a nascent stage. We hypothesize two key challenges here:…
Recent Foundation Model-enabled robotics (FMRs) display greatly improved general-purpose skills, enabling more adaptable automation than conventional robotics. Their ability to handle diverse tasks thus creates new opportunities to replace…
Mobile service robots are increasingly prevalent in human-centric, real-world domains, operating autonomously in unconstrained indoor environments. In such a context, robotic vision plays a central role in enabling service robots to…
Robots will bring search and rescue (SaR) in disaster response to another level, in case they can autonomously take over dangerous SaR tasks from humans. A main challenge for autonomous SaR robots is to safely navigate in cluttered…
As robots leave the controlled environments of factories to autonomously function in more complex, natural environments, they will have to respond to the inevitable fact that they will become damaged. However, while animals can quickly…
Robot dogs are receiving increasing attention in various fields of research. However, the number of studies investigating their potential usability on construction sites is scarce. The construction industry implies several human…