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Humanoid robots, as general-purpose physical agents, must integrate both intelligent control and adaptive morphology to operate effectively in diverse real-world environments. While recent research has focused primarily on optimizing…
Meaningful social interaction is vital to well-being, yet Blind and Low Vision (BLV) individuals face persistent barriers when collaborating with sighted peers due to inaccessible visual cues. While most wearable assistive technologies…
TalkWithMachines aims to enhance human-robot interaction by contributing to interpretable industrial robotic systems, especially for safety-critical applications. The presented paper investigates recent advancements in Large Language Models…
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…
Humanoid robots hold great potential to perform various human-level skills, involving unified locomotion and manipulation in real-world settings. Driven by advances in machine learning and the strength of existing model-based approaches,…
Legged robots are physically capable of navigating a diverse variety of environments and overcoming a wide range of obstructions. For example, in a search and rescue mission, a legged robot could climb over debris, crawl through gaps, and…
Robot navigation in crowded public spaces is a complex task that requires addressing a variety of engineering and human factors challenges. These challenges have motivated a great amount of research resulting in important developments for…
Learning-based methods have achieved strong performance for quadrupedal locomotion. However, several challenges prevent quadrupeds from learning helpful indoor skills that require interaction with environments and humans: lack of…
In the field of Geriatronics, enabling effective and transparent communication between humans and robots is crucial for enhancing the acceptance and performance of assistive robots. Our early-stage research project investigates the…
Nowadays, robots are found in a growing number of areas where they collaborate closely with humans. Enabled by lightweight materials and safety sensors, these cobots are gaining increasing popularity in domestic care, supporting people with…
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…
It is intractable for assistive robots to have all functionalities pre-programmed prior to deployment. Rather, it is more realistic for robots to perform supplemental, on-site learning about user's needs and preferences, and particularities…
Natural-language-facilitated human-robot cooperation (NLC), in which natural language (NL) is used to share knowledge between a human and a robot for conducting intuitive human-robot cooperation (HRC), is continuously developing in the…
We exploit the complementary strengths of vision and proprioception to develop a point-goal navigation system for legged robots, called VP-Nav. Legged systems are capable of traversing more complex terrain than wheeled robots, but to fully…
Autonomous mobile service robots, like lawnmowers or cleaning robots, operating in human-populated environments need to reason about local human-human interactions to support safe and socially aware navigation while fulfilling their tasks.…
This paper investigates the potential of vision-language models (VLMs) to assist people with blindness and low vision (pBLV) in navigation tasks. We evaluate state-of-the-art closed-source models, including GPT-4V, GPT-4o, Gemini-1.5-Pro,…
Finding obstacle-free paths in unknown environments is a big navigation issue for visually impaired people and autonomous robots. Previous works focus on obstacle avoidance, however they do not have a general view of the environment they…
As robotic products become more integrated into daily life, there is a greater need to understand authentic and real-world human-robot interactions to inform product design. Across many domestic, educational, and public settings, robots…
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,…
Recent development in developing humanoid robot poses new challenges to human-machine interaction communication. A major challenge is to develop robots that can behave like and interact with human in the most natural way possible. This…