Related papers: DRAGON: A Dialogue-Based Robot for Assistive Navig…
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…
Robots navigating in human environments should use language to ask for assistance and be able to understand human responses. To study this challenge, we introduce Cooperative Vision-and-Dialog Navigation, a dataset of over 2k embodied,…
Assistive robotics is an important subarea of robotics that focuses on the well-being of people with disabilities. A robotic guide dog is an assistive quadruped robot that helps visually impaired people in obstacle avoidance and navigation.…
People with visual impairments (PwVI) often have difficulties navigating through unfamiliar indoor environments. However, current wayfinding tools are fairly limited. In this short paper, we present our in-progress work on a wayfinding…
Autonomous ground robots operating in large-scale outdoor environments require both robust long-range navigation and fine-grained ''last-mile'' exploration. Current advances in visual-language navigation (VLN) work well at short-range…
While there is no replacement for the learned expertise, devotion, and social benefits of a guide dog, there are cases in which a robot navigation assistant could be helpful for individuals with blindness or low vision (BLV). This study…
The ability to converse with humans and follow natural language commands is crucial for intelligent unmanned aerial vehicles (a.k.a. drones). It can relieve people's burden of holding a controller all the time, allow multitasking, and make…
The number of robots deployed in our daily surroundings is ever-increasing. Even in the industrial set-up, the use of coworker robots is increasing rapidly. These cohabitant robots perform various tasks as instructed by co-located human…
Interactive robots navigating photo-realistic environments need to be trained to effectively leverage and handle the dynamic nature of dialogue in addition to the challenges underlying vision-and-language navigation (VLN). In this paper, we…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown promise in addressing combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) through prompt-based strategies. However, their scalability and generalization remain limited, and their effectiveness…
Autonomous robot systems for applications from search and rescue to assistive guidance should be able to engage in natural language dialog with people. To study such cooperative communication, we introduce Robot Simultaneous Localization…
Indoor built environments like homes and offices often present complex and cluttered layouts that pose significant challenges for individuals who are blind or visually impaired, especially when performing tasks that involve locating and…
Natural language understanding for robotics can require substantial domain- and platform-specific engineering. For example, for mobile robots to pick-and-place objects in an environment to satisfy human commands, we can specify the language…
Considering the widespread integration of aerial robots in inspection, search and rescue, and monitoring tasks, there is a growing demand to design intuitive human-drone interfaces. These aim to streamline and enhance the user interaction…
Linguistic ambiguity is ubiquitous in our daily lives. Previous works adopted interaction between robots and humans for language disambiguation. Nevertheless, when interactive robots are deployed in daily environments, there are significant…
This paper explores the principles for transforming a quadrupedal robot into a guide robot for individuals with visual impairments. A guide robot has great potential to resolve the limited availability of guide animals that are accessible…
Cooperation among humans makes it easy to execute tasks and navigate seamlessly even in unknown scenarios. With our individual knowledge and collective cognition skills, we can reason about and perform well in unforeseen situations and…
Humans are known to construct cognitive maps of their everyday surroundings using a variety of perceptual inputs. As such, when a human is asked for directions to a particular location, their wayfinding capability in converting this…
People with lower and upper body disabilities can benefit from wheelchairs and robotic arms to improve mobility and independence. Prior assistive interfaces, such as touchscreens and voice-driven predefined commands, often remain…
The quest for fully autonomous vehicles (AVs) capable of navigating complex real-world scenarios with human-like understanding and responsiveness. In this paper, we introduce Dolphins, a novel vision-language model architected to imbibe…