Related papers: Principles and Guidelines for Evaluating Social Ro…

Robot navigation in dynamic, human-centered environments requires socially-compliant decisions grounded in robust scene understanding. Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit promising capabilities such as object recognition,…

Trustworthiness is a crucial concept in the context of human-robot interaction. Cooperative robots must be transparent regarding their decision-making process, especially when operating in a human-oriented environment. This paper presents a…

Deploying robots in human environments requires effective social robot navigation. This article focuses on proxemics, proposing a new taxonomy and suggesting future directions through an analysis of state-of-the-art studies and the…

The demand for social robots in fields like healthcare, education, and entertainment increases due to their emotional adaptation features. These robots leverage multimodal communication, incorporating speech, facial expressions, and…

Social robots are becoming increasingly diverse in their design, behavior, and usage. In this chapter, we provide a broad-ranging overview of the main characteristics that arise when one considers social robots and their interactions with…

Over the last years, social robots have been deployed in public environments making evident the need of human-aware navigation capabilities. In this regard, the robotics community have made efforts to include proxemics or social conventions…

In social robot navigation, traditional metrics like proxemics and behavior naturalness emphasize human comfort and adherence to social norms but often fail to capture an agent's autonomy and adaptability in dynamic environments. This paper…

As robots across domains start collaborating with humans in shared environments, algorithms that enable them to reason over human intent are important to achieve safe interplay. In our work, we study human intent through the problem of…

Motivated by the vision of integrating mobile robots closer to humans in warehouses, hospitals, manufacturing plants, and the home, we focus on robot navigation in dynamic and spatially constrained environments. Ensuring human safety,…

Navigation is a must-have skill for any mobile robot. A core challenge in navigation is the need to account for an ample number of possible configurations of environment and navigation contexts. We claim that a mobile robot should be able…

The recent adoption of artificial intelligence in robotics has driven the development of algorithms that enable autonomous systems to adapt to complex social environments. In particular, safe and efficient social navigation is a key…

We present a context classification pipeline to allow a robot to change its navigation strategy based on the observed social scenario. Socially-Aware Navigation considers social behavior in order to improve navigation around people. Most of…

We claim that navigation in human environments can be viewed as cooperative activity especially in constrained situations. Humans concurrently aid and comply with each other while moving in a shared space. Cooperation helps pedestrians to…

Social Robotics poses tough challenges to software designers who are required to take care of difficult architectural drivers like acceptability, trust of robots as well as to guarantee that robots establish a personalised interaction with…

Mobile robots are increasingly deployed in cluttered environments with movable objects, posing challenges for traditional methods that prohibit interaction. In such settings, the mobile robot must go beyond traditional obstacle avoidance,…

Mobile robots are being used on a large scale in various crowded situations and become part of our society. The socially acceptable navigation behavior of a mobile robot with individual human consideration is an essential requirement for…

Robot-assisted navigation is a perfect example of a class of applications requiring flexible control approaches. When the human is reliable, the robot should concede space to their initiative. When the human makes inappropriate choices the…

As drones and autonomous cars become more widespread it is becoming increasingly important that robots can operate safely under realistic conditions. The noisy information fed into real systems means that robots must use estimates of the…

In modern society, service robots are increasingly recognized for their wide range of practical applications. In large and crowded social spaces, such as museums and hospitals, these robots are required to safely move in the environment…

Emerging applications of robotics, and concerns about their impact, require the research community to put human-centric objectives front-and-center. To meet this challenge, we advocate an interdisciplinary approach, socially cognizant…