Related papers: Designing a Wayfinding Robot for People with Visua…
Autonomous robots are used as the tool to solve many kinds of problems, such as environmental mapping and monitoring. Either for adverse conditions related to the human presence or even for the need to reduce costs, it is certain that many…
Navigating unfamiliar environments presents significant challenges for household robots, requiring the ability to recognize and reason about novel decoration and layout. Existing reinforcement learning methods cannot be directly transferred…
This paper considers the problem of enabling the user to modify the path of a telepresence robot. The robot is capable of autonomously navigating to a goal predefined by the user, but the user might still want to modify the path, for…
Robots operating in populated environments encounter many different types of people, some of whom might have an advanced need for cautious interaction, because of physical impairments or their advanced age. Robots therefore need to…
Wearable robotic devices have potential to assist and protect their users. Toward design of a Smart Helmet, this article examines the effectiveness of audio and visual warnings to help participants brace for impacts. A user study examines…
We present a novel system, AdVENTR for autonomous robot navigation in unstructured outdoor environments that consist of uneven and vegetated terrains. Our approach is general and can enable both wheeled and legged robots to handle outdoor…
We propose a framework that allows a mobile robot to build a map of an indoor scenario, identifying and highlighting objects that may be considered a hindrance to people with limited mobility. The map is built by combining recent…
Indoor navigation is a foundational technology to assist the tracking and localization of humans, autonomous vehicles, drones, and robots in indoor spaces. Due to the lack of penetration of GPS signals in buildings, subterranean locales,…
Humanoid robots, designed to operate in human-centric environments, serve as a fundamental platform for a broad range of tasks. Although humanoid robots have been extensively studied for decades, a majority of existing humanoid robots still…
We present a self-supervised approach for learning to predict traversable paths for wheeled mobile robots that require good traction to navigate. Our algorithm, termed WayFAST (Waypoint Free Autonomous Systems for Traversability), uses RGB…
People with blindness and low vision (pBLV) face significant challenges, struggling to navigate environments and locate objects due to limited visual cues. Spatial reasoning is crucial for these individuals, as it enables them to understand…
Physically assistive robots in home environments can enhance the autonomy of individuals with impairments, allowing them to regain the ability to conduct self-care and household tasks. Individuals with physical limitations may find existing…
This paper describes our recent effort to use virtual reality to simulate threatening emergency evacuation scenarios in which a robot guides a person to an exit. Our prior work has demonstrated that people will follow a robot's guidance,…
The deployment of autonomous service robots in human-centric environments is hindered by a critical gap in perception and planning. Traditional navigation systems rely on expensive LiDARs that, while geometrically precise, are semantically…
Strategies for finding one's way through an unfamiliar environment may be helped by computer generated 2D maps, 3D virtual environments, or other navigation aids. The relative effectiveness of 2D and 3D virtual navigation aids was…
Seeing-eye robots are very useful tools for guiding visually impaired people, potentially producing a huge societal impact given the low availability and high cost of real guide dogs. Although a few seeing-eye robot systems have already…
Learning visuomotor control policies in robotic systems is a fundamental problem when aiming for long-term behavioral autonomy. Recent supervised-learning-based vision and motion perception systems, however, are often separately built with…
Telepresence robots can be used to support users to navigate an environment remotely and share the visiting experience with their social partners. Although such systems allow users to see and hear the remote environment and communicate with…
With the incremental development of robotic platforms to automate the manual processes, path planning has become a critical domain with or without the knowledge of the indoor and outdoor environment. The algorithms can be intelligent or…
In this work, we investigate whether humans can manually generate high-quality robot paths for optical inspections. Typically, automated algorithms are used to solve the inspection planning problem. The use of automated algorithms implies…