Related papers: Towards Robotic Companions: Understanding Handler-…
Recent technological advancements in small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have led to the development of companion UAVs. Similar to conventional companion robots, companion UAVs have the potential to assist us in our daily lives and…
Legged robots can have a unique role in manipulating objects in dynamic, human-centric, or otherwise inaccessible environments. Although most legged robotics research to date typically focuses on traversing these challenging environments,…
As assistive and collaborative robots become more ubiquitous in the real-world, we need to develop interfaces and controllers that are safe for users to build trust and encourage adoption. In this Blue Sky paper, we discuss the need for…
Animals use limbs for both locomotion and manipulation. We aim to equip quadruped robots with similar versatility. This work introduces a system that enables quadruped robots to interact with objects using their legs, inspired by…
Social robots often rely on visual perception to understand their users and the environment. Recent advancements in data-driven approaches for computer vision have demonstrated great potentials for applying deep-learning models to enhance a…
A fruitful collaboration is based on the mutual knowledge of each other skills and on the possibility of communicating their own limits and proposing alternatives to adapt the execution of a task to the capabilities of the collaborators.…
Effective physical human-robot interaction requires systems that are not only adaptable to user preferences but also transparent about their actions. This paper introduces BRIDGE, a system for bidirectional human-robot communication in…
Physically assistive robots present an opportunity to significantly increase the well-being and independence of individuals with motor impairments or other forms of disability who are unable to complete activities of daily living (ADLs).…
Multi-robot systems are increasingly deployed in high-risk missions such as reconnaissance, disaster response, and subterranean operations. Protecting a human operator while navigating unknown and adversarial environments remains a critical…
Robots existed as separate entities till now, but the horizons of a symbiotic human-robot partnership are impending. Despite all the recent technical advances in terms of hardware, robots are still not endowed with desirable relational…
The topic of physical human-robot interaction received a lot of attention from the robotics community because of many promising application domains. However, studying physical interaction between a robot and an external agent, like a human…
Robots in shared spaces often move in ways that are difficult for people to interpret, placing the burden on humans to adapt. High-DoF robots exhibit motion that people read as expressive, intentionally or not, making it important to…
Learning companion robots for young children are increasingly adopted in informal learning environments. Although parents play a pivotal role in their children's learning, very little is known about how parents prefer to incorporate robots…
This paper presents a Human-Robot Blind Handover architecture within the context of Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC). The focus lies on a blind handover scenario where the operator is intentionally faced away, focused in a task, and requires…
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…
Autonomous mobile robots need to perceive the environments with their onboard sensors (e.g., LiDARs and RGB cameras) and then make appropriate navigation decisions. In order to navigate human-inhabited public spaces, such a navigation task…
Recent Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) advancements are promising, but their idealized assumptions about robot movement and control fail to reflect physically embodied deployment challenges. To bridge this gap, we introduce VLN-PE, a…
Indoor built environments like homes and offices often present complex and cluttered layouts that pose significant challenges for individuals who are blind or visually impaired, especially when performing tasks that involve locating and…
Feedback design is an important aspect of person-following robots for older adults. This paper presents a user-centred design approach to ensure the design is focused on the needs and preferences of the users. A sequence of user studies…
Human-aware robot navigation promises a range of applications in which mobile robots bring versatile assistance to people in common human environments. While prior research has mostly focused on modeling pedestrians as independent,…