Related papers: Toward Human-Like Social Robot Navigation: A Large…

When mobile robots maneuver near people, they run the risk of rudely blocking their paths; but not all people behave the same around robots. People that have not noticed the robot are the most difficult to predict. This paper investigates…

Socially aware robot navigation is gaining popularity with the increase in delivery and assistive robots. The research is further fueled by a need for socially aware navigation skills in autonomous vehicles to move safely and appropriately…

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,…

Human navigation in built environments depends on symbolic spatial information which has unrealised potential to enhance robot navigation capabilities. Information sources such as labels, signs, maps, planners, spoken directions, and…

Autonomous navigation is a key skill for assistive and service robots. To be successful, robots have to minimise the disruption caused to humans while moving. This implies predicting how people will move and complying with social…

Socially aware navigation is a fast-evolving research area in robotics that enables robots to move within human environments while adhering to the implicit human social norms. The advent of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has accelerated…

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…

Wearable collaborative robots stand to assist human wearers who need fall prevention assistance or wear exoskeletons. Such a robot needs to be able to constantly adapt to the surrounding scene based on egocentric vision, and predict the ego…

Recent advances in the field of machine learning have led to new ways for mobile robots to acquire advanced navigational capabilities. However, these learning-based methods raise the possibility that learned navigation behaviors may not…

Human body motions can be captured as a high-dimensional continuous signal using motion sensor technologies. The resulting data can be surprisingly rich in information, even when captured from persons with limited mobility. In this work, we…

Service robots that work alongside humans in a shared environment need a navigation system that takes into account not only physical safety but also social norms for mutual cooperation. In this paper, we introduce a motion planning system…

Robots moving safely and in a socially compliant manner in dynamic human environments is an essential benchmark for long-term robot autonomy. However, it is not feasible to learn and benchmark social navigation behaviors entirely in the…

Robot navigation in dense human crowds poses a significant challenge due to the complexity of human behavior in dynamic and obstacle-rich environments. In this work, we propose a dynamic weight adjustment scheme using a neural network to…

Real-life robot navigation involves more than just reaching a destination; it requires optimizing movements while addressing scenario-specific goals. An intuitive way for humans to express these goals is through abstract cues like verbal…

Navigating in crowded environments requires the robot to be equipped with high-level reasoning and planning techniques. Existing works focus on developing complex and heavyweight planners while ignoring the role of human intelligence. Since…

We present CoMet, a novel approach for computing a group's cohesion and using that to improve a robot's navigation in crowded scenes. Our approach uses a novel cohesion-metric that builds on prior work in social psychology. We compute this…

A wide range of human-robot collaborative applications in diverse domains such as manufacturing, health care, the entertainment industry, and social interactions, require an autonomous robot to follow its human companion. Different working…

One of the key arguments for building robots that have similar form factors to human beings is that we can leverage the massive human data for training. Yet, doing so has remained challenging in practice due to the complexities in humanoid…

Service and assistive robots are increasingly being deployed in dynamic social environments; however, ensuring transparent and explainable interactions remains a significant challenge. This paper presents a multimodal explainability module…

The distance at which a mobile robot reacts to a person strongly impacts various qualities of the human-robot interaction. In this paper, we focus on the navigation of a mobile delivery robot platform in a residential indoor hallway…