Related papers: SACSoN: Scalable Autonomous Control for Social Nav…
In socially assistive robotics, an important research area is the development of adaptation techniques and their effect on human-robot interaction. We present a meta-learning based policy gradient method for addressing the problem of…
Navigating robots discreetly in human work environments while considering the possible privacy implications of robotic tasks presents significant challenges. Such scenarios are increasingly common, for instance, when robots transport…
Recent advances in robot learning have enabled robots to become increasingly better at mastering a predefined set of tasks. On the other hand, as humans, we have the ability to learn a growing set of tasks over our lifetime. Continual robot…
Generating robot motion that fulfills multiple tasks simultaneously is challenging due to the geometric constraints imposed by the robot. In this paper, we propose to solve multi-task problems through learning structured policies from human…
Robots that physically interact with their surroundings, in order to accomplish some tasks or assist humans in their activities, require to exploit contact forces in a safe and proficient manner. Impedance control is considered as a…
Modern robotics applications that involve human-robot interaction require robots to be able to communicate with humans seamlessly and effectively. Natural language provides a flexible and efficient medium through which robots can exchange…
Navigating mobile robots in social environments remains a challenging task due to the intricacies of human-robot interactions. Most of the motion planners designed for crowded and dynamic environments focus on choosing the best velocity to…
Learning effective visuomotor policies for robots purely from data is challenging, but also appealing since a learning-based system should not require manual tuning or calibration. In the case of a robot operating in a real environment the…
Navigating social robots in dense, dynamic crowds is challenging due to environmental uncertainty and complex human-robot interactions. While Model Predictive Control (MPC) offers strong real-time performance, its reliance on a fixed…
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…
As social beings, much human behavior is predicated on social context - the ambient social state that includes cultural norms, social signals, individual preferences, etc. In this paper, we propose a socially-aware task and motion planning…
This paper introduces a new method for safety-aware robot learning, focusing on repairing policies using predictive models. Our method combines behavioral cloning with neural network repair in a two-step supervised learning framework. It…
In this paper, we address the problem of behavior-based cooperative navigation of mobile robots using safe multi-agent reinforcement learning~(MARL). Our work is the first to focus on cooperative navigation without individual reference…
We present an end-to-end online motion planning framework that uses a data-driven approach to navigate a heterogeneous robot team towards a global goal while avoiding obstacles in uncertain environments. First, we use stochastic model…
The anticipation of human behavior is a crucial capability for robots to interact with humans safely and efficiently. We employ a smart edge sensor network to provide global observations, future predictions, and goal information to…
Generating accurate and efficient predictions for the motion of the humans present in the scene is key to the development of effective motion planning algorithms for robots moving in promiscuous areas, where wrong planning decisions could…
When limited by their own morphologies, humans and some species of animals have the remarkable ability to use objects from the environment toward accomplishing otherwise impossible tasks. Robots might similarly unlock a range of additional…
Current approaches in human-aware or social robot navigation address the humans that are visible to the robot. However, it is also important to address the possible emergences of humans to avoid shocks or surprises to humans and erratic…
Service robots need to show appropriate social behaviour in order to be deployed in social environments such as healthcare, education, retail, etc. Some of the main capabilities that robots should have are navigation and conversational…
We are interested in the design of autonomous robot behaviors that learn the preferences of users over continued interactions, with the goal of efficiently executing navigation behaviors in a way that the user expects. In this paper, we…