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Recent advances in large multimodal models have enabled new opportunities in embodied AI, particularly in robotic manipulation. These models have shown strong potential in generalization and reasoning, but achieving reliable and responsible…
Social navigation for bipedal robots remains relatively unexplored due to the highly complex, nonlinear dynamics of bipedal locomotion. This study presents a preliminary exploration of social navigation for bipedal robots in a human crowded…
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…
Robot social navigation needs to adapt to different human factors and environmental contexts. However, since these factors and contexts are difficult to predict and cannot be exhaustively enumerated, traditional learning-based methods have…
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…
Autonomous shipping has recently gained much interest in the research community. However, little research focuses on inland - and port navigation, even though this is identified by countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands as an…
In this paper we investigate potential issues of fairness related to the motion of mobile robots. We focus on the particular use case of humanitarian mapping and disaster response. We start by showing that there is a fairness dimension to…
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…
Risk assessment of a robot in controlled environments, such as laboratories and proving grounds, is a common means to assess, certify, validate, verify, and characterize the robots' safety performance before, during, and even after their…
Reinforcement learning (RL) methods for social robot navigation show great success navigating robots through large crowds of people, but the performance of these learning-based methods tends to degrade in particularly challenging or…
Following up on our previous works, in this paper, we present Arena-Rosnav 2.0 an extension to our previous works Arena-Bench and Arena-Rosnav, which adds a variety of additional modules for developing and benchmarking robotic navigation…
Understanding how humans evaluate robot behavior during human-robot interactions is crucial for developing socially aware robots that behave according to human expectations. While the traditional approach to capturing these evaluations is…
Machine learning has significantly enhanced the abilities of robots, enabling them to perform a wide range of tasks in human environments and adapt to our uncertain real world. Recent works in various machine learning domains have…
Autonomous mechanisms have been proposed to regulate certain aspects of society and are already being used to regulate business organisations. We take seriously recent proposals for algorithmic regulation of society, and we identify the…
In this paper, we present a robotic navigation algorithm with natural language interfaces, which enables a robot to safely walk through a changing environment with moving persons by following human instructions such as "go to the restaurant…
Tactile sensors have been introduced to a wide range of robotic tasks such as robot manipulation to mimic the sense of human touch. However, there has only been a few works that integrate tactile sensing into robot navigation. This paper…
To operate safely and efficiently, autonomous warehouse/delivery robots must be able to accomplish tasks while navigating in dynamic environments and handling the large uncertainties associated with the motions/behaviors of other robots…
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…
This article introduces a software framework for benchmarking robot task scheduling algorithms in dynamic and uncertain service environments. The system provides standardized interfaces, configurable scenarios with movable objects, human…
This paper presents the behaviour control of a service robot for intelligent object search in a domestic environment. A major challenge in service robotics is to enable fetch-and-carry missions that are satisfying for the user in terms of…