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As robots are being increasingly used in close proximity to humans and objects, it is imperative that robots operate safely and efficiently under real-world conditions. Yet, the environment is seldom known perfectly. Noisy sensors and…
Ensuring safety is paramount in the field of collaborative robotics to mitigate the risks of human injury and environmental damage. Apart from collision avoidance, it is crucial for robots to rapidly detect and respond to unexpected…
Humanoid robots are expected to operate in human-centered environments where safe and natural physical interaction is essential. However, most recent reinforcement learning (RL) policies emphasize rigid tracking and suppress external…
Recent advancements in robotics have increased the possibilities for integrating robotic systems into human-involved workplaces, highlighting the need to examine and optimize human-robot coordination in collaborative settings. This study…
Robotic manipulation can greatly benefit from the data efficiency, robustness, and predictability of model-based methods if robots can quickly generate models of novel objects they encounter. This is especially difficult when effects like…
In order to enable physical human-robot interaction where humans and (mobile) manipulators share their workspace and work together, robots have to be equipped with important capabilities to guarantee human safety. The robots have to…
Electric quadruped robots used in outdoor exploration are susceptible to leg-related electrical or mechanical failures. Unexpected joint power loss and joint locking can immediately pose a falling threat. Typically, controllers lack the…
Human-robot co-carrying tasks reveal their potential in both industrial and everyday applications by leveraging the strengths of both parties. Effective control of robots in these tasks requires managing the energy level in the closed-loop…
Autonomous navigation in highly populated areas remains a challenging task for robots because of the difficulty in guaranteeing safe interactions with pedestrians in unstructured situations. In this work, we present a crowd navigation…
The design of physical compliance -- its location, degree, and structure -- affects robot performance and robustness in contact-rich tasks. While compliance is often used in the robot's joints, flange, or end-effector, this paper proposes…
Humans possess a remarkable ability to react to unpredictable perturbations through immediate mechanical responses, which harness the visco-elastic properties of muscles to maintain balance. Inspired by this behaviour, we propose a novel…
Current state-of-the-art crowd navigation approaches are mainly deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based. However, DRL-based methods suffer from the issues of generalization and scalability. To overcome these challenges, we propose a method…
There is an increased demand for task automation in robots. Contact-rich tasks, wherein multiple contact transitions occur in a series of operations, are extensively being studied to realize high accuracy. In this study, we propose a…
Mechanism calibration is an important and non-trivial task in robotics. Advances in sensor technology make affordable but increasingly accurate devices such as cameras and tactile sensors available, making it possible to perform automated…
Stewart platform-based Parallel Kinematic (PKM) Machines have been extensively studied by researchers due to their inherent finer control characteristics. This has opened its potential deployment opportunities in versatile critical…
Emergency stop (E-stop) mechanisms are the de facto standard for robot safety. However, for humanoid robots, abruptly cutting power can itself cause catastrophic failures; instead, an emergency stop must execute a predefined fallback…
Motion mimicking, i.e., encouraging the control policy to mimic human motion, facilitates the learning of complex tasks via reinforcement learning (RL) for humanoid robots. Although standard RL frameworks demonstrate impressive locomotion…
Navigation strategies that intentionally incorporate contact with humans (i.e. "contact-based" social navigation) in crowded environments are largely unexplored even though collision-free social navigation is a well studied problem.…
Guiding the visually impaired in complex environments requires real-time two-way interaction and safety assurance. We propose a Force-Compliance Model Predictive Control (FC-MPC) and Robot-User Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) for…
With the advancements in human-robot interaction (HRI), robots are now capable of operating in close proximity and engaging in physical interactions with humans (pHRI). Likewise, contact-based pHRI is becoming increasingly common as robots…