Related papers: The HAPPY HEDGEHOG Project
Since humans and robots are increasingly sharing portions of their operational spaces, experimental evidence is needed to ascertain the safety and social acceptability of robots in human-populated environments. Although several studies have…
The growing global demand for critical raw materials (CRMs) has highlighted the need to access difficult and hazardous environments such as abandoned underground mines. These sites pose significant challenges for conventional machinery and…
Social robots are increasingly being explored as tools to support emotional wellbeing, particularly in non-clinical settings. Drawing on a range of empirical studies and practical deployments, this paper outlines six key insights that…
Many organisms, including various species of spiders and caterpillars, change their shape to switch gaits and adapt to different environments. Recent technological advances, ranging from stretchable circuits to highly deformable soft…
When mobile robots maneuver near people, they run the risk of rudely blocking their paths; but not all people behave the same around robots. People that have not noticed the robot are the most difficult to predict. This paper investigates…
For mobile robots to be effectively applied to real world unstructured environments -- such as large scale farming -- they require the ability to generate adaptive plans that account both for limited onboard resources, and the presence of…
Robots and particularly drones are especially useful in exploring extreme environments that pose hazards to humans. To ensure safe operations in these situations, usually perceptually degraded and without good GNSS, it is critical to have a…
COVID-19 pandemic has become a global challenge faced by people all over the world. Social distancing has been proved to be an effective practice to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Against this backdrop, we propose that the surveillance…
Humanoid robots hold great promise in assisting humans in diverse environments and tasks, due to their flexibility and adaptability leveraging human-like morphology. However, research in humanoid robots is often bottlenecked by the costly…
Robust locomotion control depends on accurate state estimations. However, the sensors of most legged robots can only provide partial and noisy observations, making the estimation particularly challenging, especially for external states like…
With the rising applications of robots in unstructured real-world environments, roboticists are increasingly concerned with the problems posed by the complexity of such environments. One solution to these problems is robot autonomy. Since…
The objective of this work is to expand upon previous works, considering socially acceptable behaviours within robot navigation and interaction, and allow a robot to closely approach static and dynamic individuals or groups. The space…
While assistive robots have much potential to help older people with frailty-related needs, there are few in use. There is a gap between what is developed in laboratories and what would be viable in real-world contexts. Through a series of…
The deployment of robots in industrial and civil scenarios is a viable solution to protect operators from danger and hazards. Shared autonomy is paramount to enable remote control of complex systems such as legged robots, allowing the…
Human-Robot Teams offer the flexibility needed for partial automation in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). They will thus be an integral part of Factories of the Future. Our research targets a particularly flexible teaming mode,…
We present a new social animal inspired emotional swarm intelligence technique. This technique is used to solve a variant of the popular collective robots problem called foraging. We show with a simulation study how simple interaction rules…
Soft robots have the ability to adapt to their environment, which makes them suitable for use in disaster areas and agricultural fields, where their mobility is constrained by complex terrain. One of the main challenges in developing soft…
As of today, robots exhibit impressive agility but also pose potential hazards to humans using/collaborating with them. Consequently, safety is considered the most paramount factor in human-robot interaction (HRI). This paper presents a…
With the advances in robotic technology, research in human-robot collaboration (HRC) has gained in importance. For robots to interact with humans autonomously they need active decision making that takes human partners into account. However,…
As robotic technology advances, the barriers to the coexistence of humans and robots are slowly coming down. Application domains like elderly care, collaborative manufacturing, collaborative manipulation, etc., are considered the need of…