Related papers: Value of Assistance for Mobile Agents
We study a class of cooperative multi-agent optimization problems, where each agent is associated with a local action vector and a local cost, and the goal is to cooperatively find the joint action profile that minimizes the average of the…
This paper develops an autonomous tethered aerial visual assistant for robot operations in unstructured or confined environments. Robotic tele-operation in remote environments is difficult due to lack of sufficient situational awareness,…
We consider problems in which a mobile robot samples an unknown function defined over its operating space, so as to find a global optimum of this function. The path traveled by the robot matters, since it influences energy and time…
We consider the problem of dynamically allocating tasks to multiple agents under time window constraints and task completion uncertainty. Our objective is to minimize the number of unsuccessful tasks at the end of the operation horizon. We…
Allocating tasks to heterogeneous robot teams in environments with uncertain task requirements is a fundamentally challenging problem. Redundantly assigning multiple robots to such tasks is overly conservative, while purely reactive…
In-car Voice Assistants (VAs) play an increasingly critical role in automotive user interface design. However, existing VAs primarily perform simple 'query-answer' tasks, limiting their ability to sustain drivers' long-term attention. In…
If a robotic agent wants to exploit symbolic planning techniques to achieve some goal, it must be able to properly ground an abstract planning domain in the environment in which it operates. However, if the environment is initially unknown…
Vehicles are becoming increasingly intelligent and connected, incorporating more and more sensors to support safer and more efficient driving. The large volume of data generated by such sensors, however, will likely saturate the capacity of…
LLM agents emit actions, not just text, and once taken, those actions often cannot be undone. Yet today's agent-safety evaluations run greedy or a few sampled rollouts and report a single safe/unsafe rate -- blind to the long-tail…
We address the localization of robots in a multi-MAV system where external infrastructure like GPS or motion capture systems may not be available. Our approach lends itself to implementation on platforms with several constraints on size,…
We consider the problem of creating assistants that can help agents solve new sequential decision problems, assuming the agent is not able to specify the reward function explicitly to the assistant. Instead of acting in place of the agent…
The ability of robots to estimate their location is crucial for a wide variety of autonomous operations. In settings where GPS is unavailable, measurements of transmissions from fixed beacons provide an effective means of estimating a…
The ability to accurately estimate the position of robotic agents relative to one another, in possibly GPS-denied environments, is crucial to execute collaborative tasks. Inter-agent range measurements are available at a low cost, due to…
This paper improves visual-inertial systems to boost the localization accuracy for low-cost rescue robots. When robots traverse on rugged terrain, the performance of pose estimation suffers from big noise on the measurements of the inertial…
Computing value of information (VOI) is a crucial task in various aspects of decision-making under uncertainty, such as in meta-reasoning for search; in selecting measurements to make, prior to choosing a course of action; and in managing…
Understanding human intentions is critical for safe and effective human-robot collaboration. While state of the art methods for human goal prediction utilize learned models to account for the uncertainty of human motion data, that data is…
Multi-agent systems are prevalent in a wide range of domains including power systems, vehicular networks, and robotics. Two important problems to solve in these types of systems are how the intentions of non-coordinating agents can be…
This paper presents a method to improve the localization accuracy of robots operating in a range-based localization network. The method is favorable especially when the robots operate in harsh environments where the access to a robust and…
Accurate 6D object pose estimation is essential for various robotic tasks. Uncertain pose estimates can lead to task failures; however, a certain degree of error in the pose estimates is often acceptable. Hence, by quantifying errors in the…
Location estimation is a fundamental sensing task in robotic applications, where the world is uncertain, and sensors and effectors are noisy. Most systems make various assumptions about the dependencies between state variables, and…