Related papers: DRAGON: A Dialogue-Based Robot for Assistive Navig…
Object navigation in open-world environments remains a formidable and pervasive challenge for robotic systems, particularly when it comes to executing long-horizon tasks that require both open-world object detection and high-level task…
We consider an autonomous navigation robot that can accept human commands through natural language to provide services in an indoor environment. These natural language commands may include time, position, object, and action components.…
Navigational signs are common aids for human wayfinding and scene understanding, but are underutilized by robots. We argue that they benefit robot navigation and scene understanding, by directly encoding privileged information on actions,…
Lacking the ability to sense ambient environments effectively, blind and visually impaired people (BVIP) face difficulty in walking outdoors, especially in urban areas. Therefore, tools for assisting BVIP are of great importance. In this…
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…
The development of embodied agents that can communicate with humans in natural language has gained increasing interest over the last years, as it facilitates the diffusion of robotic platforms in human-populated environments. As a step…
Some robots can interact with humans using natural language, and identify service requests through human-robot dialog. However, few robots are able to improve their language capabilities from this experience. In this paper, we develop a…
Recent research highlights the potential of drones to enhance pedestrian experiences, such as aiding navigation and supporting street-level activities. This paper explores the design of drone interfaces to assist pedestrians crossing…
Navigation presents a significant challenge for persons with visual impairments (PVI). While traditional aids such as white canes and guide dogs are invaluable, they fall short in delivering detailed spatial information and precise guidance…
As autonomous robotic systems become increasingly mature, users will want to specify missions at the level of intent rather than in low-level detail. Language is an expressive and intuitive medium for such mission specification. However,…
Visual Language Navigation is a task that challenges robots to navigate in realistic environments based on natural language instructions. While previous research has largely focused on static settings, real-world navigation must often…
While guide dogs offer essential mobility assistance, their high cost, limited availability, and care requirements make them inaccessible to most blind or low vision (BLV) individuals. Recent advances in quadruped robots provide a scalable…
Service and assistive robots are increasingly being deployed in dynamic social environments; however, ensuring transparent and explainable interactions remains a significant challenge. This paper presents a multimodal explainability module…
Guide dogs play a critical role in the lives of many, however training them is a time- and labor-intensive process. We are developing a method to allow an autonomous robot to physically guide humans using direct human-robot communication.…
Autonomous driving systems have made significant advances in Q&A, perception, prediction, and planning based on local visual information, yet they struggle to incorporate broader navigational context that human drivers routinely utilize. We…
Natural language offers an intuitive and flexible means for humans to communicate with the robots that we will increasingly work alongside in our homes and workplaces. Recent advancements have given rise to robots that are able to interpret…
Assisting humans in open-world outdoor environments requires robots to translate high-level natural-language intentions into safe, long-horizon, and socially compliant navigation behavior. Existing map-based methods rely on costly pre-built…
Grounding language to the visual observations of a navigating agent can be performed using off-the-shelf visual-language models pretrained on Internet-scale data (e.g., image captions). While this is useful for matching images to natural…
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires grounding instructions, such as "turn right and stop at the door", to routes in a visual environment. The actual grounding can connect language to the environment through multiple modalities,…
Robots operating alongside humans in diverse, stochastic environments must be able to accurately interpret natural language commands. These instructions often fall into one of two categories: those that specify a goal condition or target…