Related papers: Principles and Guidelines for Evaluating Social Ro…
This paper presents the framework for a novel Unified Socially-Aware Navigation (USAN) architecture and explains its need in Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR) applications. Our approach emphasizes interpersonal distance and how spatial…
Integrating mobile robots into human society involves the fundamental problem of navigation in crowds. This problem has been studied by considering the behaviour of humans at the level of individuals, but this representation limits the…
Social navigation in densely populated dynamic environments poses a significant challenge for autonomous mobile robots, requiring advanced strategies for safe interaction. Existing reinforcement learning (RL)-based methods require over…
Robots of the future are going to exhibit increasingly human-like and super-human intelligence in a myriad of different tasks. They are also likely going to fail and be incompliant with human preferences in increasingly subtle ways. Towards…
The popularity of mobile robots has been steadily growing, with these robots being increasingly utilized to execute tasks previously completed by human workers. For bipedal robots to see this same success, robust autonomous navigation…
Intelligent robots and machines are becoming pervasive in human populated environments. A desirable capability of these agents is to respond to goal-oriented commands by autonomously constructing task plans. However, such autonomy can add…
To navigate safely and efficiently in crowded spaces, robots should not only perceive the current state of the environment but also anticipate future human movements. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning architecture, namely…
The Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) community often highlights the social context of an interaction as a key consideration when designing, implementing, and evaluating robot behavior. Unfortunately, researchers use the term "social context"…
The robotics community has seen an exponential growth in the level of complexity of the theoretical tools presented for the modeling of soft robotics devices. Different solutions have been presented to overcome the difficulties related to…
With robotics rapidly advancing, more effective human-robot interaction is increasingly needed to realize the full potential of robots for society. While spoken language must be part of the solution, our ability to provide spoken language…
Teaching autonomous mobile robots to successfully navigate human crowds is a challenging task. Not only does it require planning, but it requires maintaining social norms which may differ from one context to another. Here we focus on crowd…
Nowadays, mobile robots are deployed in many indoor environments, such as offices or hospitals. These environments are subject to changes in the traversability that often happen by following repeating patterns. In this paper, we investigate…
Reinforcement learning has recently experienced increased prominence in the machine learning community. There are many approaches to solving reinforcement learning problems with new techniques developed constantly. When solving problems…
The challenge of traversability estimation is a crucial aspect of autonomous navigation in unstructured outdoor environments such as forests. It involves determining whether certain areas are passable or risky for robots, taking into…
Most current approaches to social navigation focus on the trajectory and position of participants in the interaction. Our current work on the topic focuses on integrating gaze into social navigation, both to cue nearby pedestrians as to the…
In situations where humans and robots are moving in the same space whilst performing their own tasks, predictable paths taken by mobile robots can not only make the environment feel safer, but humans can also help with the navigation in the…
Characterizing the community structure of complex networks is a key challenge in many scientific fields. Very diverse algorithms and methods have been proposed to this end, many working reasonably well in specific situations. However, no…
Autonomy and independent navigation are vital to daily life but remain challenging for individuals with blindness. Robotic systems can enhance mobility and confidence by providing intelligent navigation assistance. However, fully autonomous…
Social robot navigation can be helpful in various contexts of daily life but requires safe human-robot interactions and efficient trajectory planning. While modeling pairwise relations has been widely studied in multi-agent interacting…
Robotic guidance systems have shown promise in supporting blind and visually impaired (BVI) individuals with wayfinding and obstacle avoidance. However, most existing systems assume a clear path and do not support a critical aspect of…