Related papers: Principles and Guidelines for Evaluating Social Ro…
Autonomous cleaning robots for public spaces have potential for addressing current societal challenges, such as labor shortages and cleanliness in public spaces. Other application domains like autonomous driving, bin picking, or search and…
Navigating socially in human environments requires more than satisfying geometric constraints, as collision-free paths may still interfere with ongoing activities or conflict with social norms. Addressing this challenge calls for analyzing…
Recent advancements in robotics have transformed industries such as manufacturing, logistics, surgery, and planetary exploration. A key challenge is developing efficient motion planning algorithms that allow robots to navigate complex…
Navigation is an essential ability for mobile agents to be completely autonomous and able to perform complex actions. However, the problem of navigation for agents with limited (or no) perception of the world, or devoid of a fully defined…
Socially compliant navigation requires robots to move safely and appropriately in human-centered environments by respecting social norms. However, social norms are often ambiguous, and in a single scenario, multiple actions may be equally…
Nowadays, robots are expected to interact more physically, cognitively, and socially with people. They should adapt to unpredictable contexts alongside individuals with various behaviours. For this reason, personalisation is a valuable…
The future robots are expected to work in a shared physical space with humans [1], however, the presence of humans leads to a dynamic environment that is challenging for mobile robots to navigate. The path planning algorithms designed to…
Mobile robots are increasingly populating homes, hospitals, shopping malls, factory floors, and other human environments. Human society has social norms that people mutually accept; obeying these norms is an essential signal that someone is…
Autonomous systems are increasingly deployed in open and dynamic environments -- from city streets to aerial and indoor spaces -- where perception models must remain reliable under sensor noise, environmental variation, and platform shifts.…
The robot learning community has made great strides in recent years, proposing new architectures and showcasing impressive new capabilities; however, the dominant metric used in the literature, especially for physical experiments, is…
Uniform and variable environments still remain a challenge for stable visual localization and mapping in mobile robot navigation. One of the possible approaches suitable for such environments is appearance-based teach-and-repeat navigation,…
We propose VLM-Social-Nav, a novel Vision-Language Model (VLM) based navigation approach to compute a robot's motion in human-centered environments. Our goal is to make real-time decisions on robot actions that are socially compliant with…
This paper addresses the problem of planning a safe (i.e., collision-free) trajectory from an initial state to a goal region when the obstacle space is a-priori unknown and is incrementally revealed online, e.g., through line-of-sight…
For robots to navigate and interact more richly with the world around them, they will likely require a deeper understanding of the world in which they operate. In robotics and related research fields, the study of understanding is often…
The proliferation of robots in public spaces necessitates a deeper understanding of how these robots can interact with those they share the space with. In this paper, we present findings from video analysis of publicly deployed cleaning…
Social robots are expected to be a human labor support technology, and one application of them is an advertising medium in public spaces. When social robots provide information, such as recommended shops, adaptive communication according to…
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…
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…
As mobile robots are increasingly deployed in human environments, enabling them to predict how people perceive them is critical for socially adaptable navigation. Predicting perceptions is challenging for two main reasons: (1) HRI…
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…