Related papers: The HAPPY HEDGEHOG Project
Legged machines are becoming increasingly agile and adaptive but they have so far lacked the morphological diversity of legged animals, which have been rearranged and reshaped to fill millions of niches. Unlike their biological…
With robots leaving factories and entering less controlled domains, possibly sharing the space with humans, safety is paramount and multimodal awareness of the body surface and the surrounding environment is fundamental. Taking inspiration…
Robots moving safely and in a socially compliant manner in dynamic human environments is an essential benchmark for long-term robot autonomy. However, it is not feasible to learn and benchmark social navigation behaviors entirely in the…
A remote collaboration setup allows an expert to instruct a remotely located novice user to help them with a task. Advanced solutions exist in the field of remote guidance and telemanipulation, however, we lack a device that combines these…
Legged locomotion is a highly promising but under-researched subfield within the field of soft robotics. The compliant limbs of soft-limbed robots offer numerous benefits, including the ability to regulate impacts, tolerate falls, and…
While robots are increasingly integrated into the built environment, little is known how their qualities can meaningfully influence our spaces to facilitate enjoyable and agreeable interaction, rather than robotic settings that are driven…
Many industrial tasks-such as sanding, installing fasteners, and wire harnessing-are difficult to automate due to task complexity and variability. We instead investigate deploying robots in an assistive role for these tasks, where the robot…
Robots are increasingly working alongside people, delivering food to patrons in restaurants or helping workers on assembly lines. These scenarios often involve object handovers between the person and the robot. To achieve safe and efficient…
As social robots become increasingly prevalent in day-to-day environments, they will participate in conversations and appropriately manage the information shared with them. However, little is known about how robots might appropriately…
Agricultural robotics and automation are facing some challenges rooted in the high variability 9 of products, task complexity, crop quality requirement, and dense vegetation. Such a set of 10 challenges demands a more versatile and safe…
As social beings, much human behavior is predicated on social context - the ambient social state that includes cultural norms, social signals, individual preferences, etc. In this paper, we propose a socially-aware task and motion planning…
Robots are being designed to communicate with people in various public and domestic venues in a helpful, discreet way. Here, we use a speculative approach to shine light on a new concept of robot steganography (RS), that a robot could seek…
Recent advances in learned control, large-scale simulation, and generative models have accelerated progress toward general-purpose robotic controllers, yet the field still lacks platforms suitable for safe, expressive, long-term deployment…
Socially aware robot navigation is gaining popularity with the increase in delivery and assistive robots. The research is further fueled by a need for socially aware navigation skills in autonomous vehicles to move safely and appropriately…
Robotic shepherding problem considers the control and navigation of a group of coherent agents (e.g., a flock of bird or a fleet of drones) through the motion of an external robot, called shepherd. Machine learning based methods have…
Service robots are appearing more and more in our daily life. The development of service robots combines multiple fields of research, from object perception to object manipulation. The state-of-the-art continues to improve to make a proper…
Despite the many recent achievements in developing and deploying social robotics, there are still many underexplored environments and applications for which systematic evaluation of such systems by end-users is necessary. While several…
Empowering robots to navigate in a socially compliant manner is essential for the acceptance of robots moving in human-inhabited environments. Previously, roboticists have developed geometric navigation systems with decades of empirical…
Affective robotics research aims to better understand human social and emotional signals to improve human-robot interaction (HRI), and has been widely used during the last decade in multiple application fields. Past works have demonstrated,…
Traditional robots have rigid links and structures that limit their ability to interact with the dynamics of their immediate environment. For example, conventional robot manipulators with rigid links can only manipulate objects using…