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Socially aware robot navigation is a planning paradigm where the robot navigates in human environments and tries to adhere to social constraints while interacting with the humans in the scene. These navigation strategies were further…

Robots with a high level of autonomy are increasingly requested by smart industries. A way to reduce the workers' stress and effort is to optimize the working environment by taking advantage of autonomous collaborative robots. A typical…

Robots operating in human spaces must be able to engage in natural language interaction with people, both understanding and executing instructions, and using conversation to resolve ambiguity and recover from mistakes. To study this, we…

Objects rarely sit in isolation in everyday human environments. If we want robots to operate and perform tasks in our human environments, they must understand how the objects they manipulate will interact with structural elements of the…

Effective human-robot collaboration requires informed anticipation. The robot must anticipate the human's actions, but also react quickly and intuitively when its predictions are wrong. The robot must plan its actions to account for the…

The increasing presence of robots alongside humans, such as in human-robot teams in manufacturing, gives rise to research questions about the kind of behaviors people prefer in their robot counterparts. We term actions that support…

Human collaborators can effectively communicate with their partners to finish a common task by inferring each other's mental states (e.g., goals, beliefs, and desires). Such mind-aware communication minimizes the discrepancy among…

Natural language is an effective tool for communication, as information can be expressed in different ways and at different levels of complexity. Verbal commands, utilized for instructing robot tasks, can therefor replace traditional robot…

As social service robots become commonplace, it is essential for them to effectively interpret human signals, such as verbal, gesture, and eye gaze, when people need to focus on their primary tasks to minimize interruptions and…

In this paper we propose FlexHRC+, a hierarchical human-robot cooperation architecture designed to provide collaborative robots with an extended degree of autonomy when supporting human operators in high-variability shop-floor tasks. The…

To coordinate actions with an interaction partner requires a constant exchange of sensorimotor signals. Humans acquire these skills in infancy and early childhood mostly by imitation learning and active engagement with a skilled partner.…

Human Action Recognition is an important task of Human Robot Interaction as cooperation between robots and humans requires that artificial agents recognise complex cues from the environment. A promising approach is using trained classifiers…

It is important for socially assistive robots to be able to recognize when a user needs and wants help. Such robots need to be able to recognize human needs in a real-time manner so that they can provide timely assistance. We propose an…

Human-technology collaboration relies on verbal and non-verbal communication. Machines must be able to detect and understand the movements of humans to facilitate non-verbal communication. In this article, we introduce ongoing research on…

For planning an assembly of a product from a given set of parts, robots necessitate certain cognitive skills: high-level planning is needed to decide the order of actuation actions, while geometric reasoning is needed to check the…

When cooperating with a human, a robot should not only care about its environment and task but also develop an understanding of the partner's reasoning. To support its human partner in complex tasks, the robot can share information that it…

Emotions guide our decision making process and yet have been little explored in practical ethical decision making scenarios. In this challenge, we explore emotions and how they can influence ethical decision making in a home robot context:…

Robots are required to autonomously respond to changing situations. Imitation learning is a promising candidate for achieving generalization performance, and extensive results have been demonstrated in object manipulation. However,…

Collaborative robotics requires effective communication between a robot and a human partner. This work proposes a set of interpretive principles for how a robotic arm can use pointing actions to communicate task information to people by…

It is challenging for humans -- particularly those living with physical disabilities -- to control high-dimensional, dexterous robots. Prior work explores learning embedding functions that map a human's low-dimensional inputs (e.g., via a…