Related papers: The HAPPY HEDGEHOG Project
Reinforcement learning has been widely applied to robotic control, but effective policy learning under partial observability remains a major challenge, especially in high-dimensional tasks like humanoid locomotion. To date, no prior work…
The success of smart environments largely depends on their smartness of understanding the environments' ongoing situations. Accordingly, this task is an essence to smart environment central processors. Obtaining knowledge from the…
In response to the global need for sustainable energy, green technology may help fight climate change. Before green infrastructure to be easily integrated into the world's energy system, it needs upgrading. By improving energy…
According to the American Heritage Dictionary [1],Robotics is the science or study of the technology associated with the design, fabrication, theory, and application of Robots. The term Hoverbot is also often used to refer to sophisticated…
This paper addresses the question of how to increase the acceptability of a robot hug and whether such a hug contributes to well-being. It combines the lead author's own research with pioneering research by Alexis E. Block and Katherine J.…
Data acquisition in animal ecology is rapidly accelerating due to inexpensive and accessible sensors such as smartphones, drones, satellites, audio recorders and bio-logging devices. These new technologies and the data they generate hold…
Humanoid robots that can autonomously operate in diverse environments have the potential to help address labour shortages in factories, assist elderly at homes, and colonize new planets. While classical controllers for humanoid robots have…
Heterogeneous robots equipped with multi-modal sensors (e.g., UAV, wheeled and legged terrestrial robots) provide rich and complementary functions that may help human operators to accomplish complex tasks in unknown environments. However,…
Robot-assisted feeding enables people with disabilities who require assistance eating to enjoy a meal independently and with dignity. However, existing systems have only been tested in-lab or in-home, leaving in-the-wild social dining…
Solving mobile manipulation tasks in inaccessible and dangerous environments is an important application of robots to support humans. Example domains are construction and maintenance of manned and unmanned stations on the moon and other…
While robots have previously utilized rule-based systems or probabilistic models for user interaction, the rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) presents new opportunities to develop LLM-powered robots for enhanced human-robot…
As both legged robots and embedded compute have become more capable, researchers have started to focus on field deployment of these robots. Robust autonomy in unstructured environments requires perception of the world around the robot in…
Designing systems for autonomous transport of groups of living agents has received a lot of attention in recent years due to a wealth of important potential applications. Biomimetic approaches are often sought, and a range of herding…
For a robot to be called socially intelligent, it must be able to infer users internal states from their current behaviour, predict the users future behaviour, and if required, respond appropriately. In this work, we investigate how robots…
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…
The physical interaction of aerial robots with their environment has countless potential applications and is an emerging area with many open challenges. Fully-actuated multirotors have been introduced to tackle some of these challenges.…
Robots are becoming increasingly popular in a wide range of environments due to their exceptional work capacity, precision, efficiency, and scalability. This development has been further encouraged by advances in Artificial Intelligence,…
Humanoid robots are designed to navigate environments accessible to humans using their legs. However, classical research has primarily focused on controlled laboratory settings, resulting in a gap in developing controllers for navigating…
Automatic design is a promising approach to realizing robot swarms. Given a mission to be performed by the swarm, an automatic method produces the required control software for the individual robots. Automatic design has concentrated on…
Existing household robots have made significant progress in performing routine tasks, such as cleaning floors or delivering objects. However, a key limitation of these robots is their inability to recognize potential problems or dangers in…