Related papers: Lessons from Robot-Assisted Disaster Response Depl…
Ground robots require the crucial capability of traversing unstructured and unprepared terrains and avoiding obstacles to complete tasks in real-world robotics applications such as disaster response. When a robot operates in off-road field…
Deploying mobile robots in construction sites to collaborate with workers or perform automated tasks such as surveillance and inspections carries the potential to greatly increase productivity, reduce human errors, and save costs. However…
Integrating robots into teams of humans is anticipated to bring significant capability improvements for tasks such as searching potentially hazardous buildings. Trust between humans and robots is recognized as a key enabler for human-robot…
Care-giving and assistive robotics, driven by advancements in AI, offer promising solutions to meet the growing demand for care, particularly in the context of increasing numbers of individuals requiring assistance. This creates a pressing…
We are witnessing a rapid increase in real-world autonomous robotic deployments in environments ranging from indoor homes and commercial establishments to large-scale urban areas, with applications ranging from domestic assistance to urban…
As a fire erupts, the first few minutes can be critical, and first respondents must race to the scene to analyze the situation and act fast before it gets out of hand. Factors such as road traffic condition and distance may not allow quick…
This paper presents an overview of robot failure detection work from HRI and adjacent fields using failures as an opportunity to examine robot explanation behaviours. As humanoid robots remain experimental tools in the early 2020s,…
Multiple robotic systems, working together, can provide important solutions to different real-world applications (e.g., disaster response), among which task allocation problems feature prominently. Very few existing decentralized…
Learning from demonstration is widely used for robot navigation, yet it suffers from a fundamental limitation: demonstrations consist predominantly of successful behaviors and provide limited coverage of unsafe states. This limitation leads…
Building fires pose a persistent threat to life, property, and infrastructure, emphasizing the need for advanced risk mitigation strategies. This study presents a data-driven framework analyzing U.S. fire risks by integrating over one…
Contemporary robots have become exceptionally skilled at achieving specific tasks in structured environments. However, they often fail when faced with the limitless permutations of real-world unstructured environments. This motivates…
The increasing complexity of natural disaster incidents demands innovative technological solutions to support first responders in their efforts. This paper introduces the TRIFFID system, a comprehensive technical framework that integrates…
Autonomous mobile robots have the potential to solve missions that are either too complex or dangerous to be accomplished by humans. In this paper, we address the design and autonomous deployment of a ground vehicle equipped with a robotic…
Current robot platforms are being employed to collaborate with humans in a wide range of domestic and industrial tasks. These environments require autonomous systems that are able to classify and communicate anomalous situations such as…
In emergency situations, actions that save lives and limit the impact of hazards are crucial. In order to act, situational awareness is needed to decide what to do. Geolocalized photos and video of the situations as they evolve can be…
Innovative ideas are continuously emerging to produce better life conditions where essential human needs are supposed to be fulfilled with perfect scenarios leading us to propose modern strategies drawing the future of smart cities. In this…
Deploying a team of robots that can carefully coordinate their actions can make the entire system robust to individual failures. In this report, we review recent algorithmic development in making multi-robot systems robust to environmental…
Earthquakes cause catastrophic damage to buildings and loss of human life. Civil engineers across the globe design earthquake-resistant buildings to minimize this damage. Conventionally, the structures are designed to resist the…
Safe, reliable navigation in extreme, unfamiliar terrain is required for future robotic space exploration missions. Recent generative-AI methods learn semantically aware navigation policies from large, cross-embodiment datasets, but offer…
This paper considers the problem of developing suitable behavior models of human evacuees during a robot-guided emergency evacuation. We describe our recent research developing behavior models of evacuees and potential future uses of these…