Related papers: Equivalent Environments and Covering Spaces for Ro…
Robot deployment in realistic dynamic environments is a challenging problem despite the fact that robots can be quite skilled at a large number of isolated tasks. One reason for this is that robots are rarely equipped with powerful…
A wide range of human-robot collaborative applications in diverse domains such as manufacturing, health care, the entertainment industry, and social interactions, require an autonomous robot to follow its human companion. Different working…
Human-robot interaction requires a common understanding of the operational environment, which can be provided by a representation that blends geometric and symbolic knowledge: a semantic map. Through a semantic map the robot can interpret…
The information available to robots in real tasks is widely distributed both in time and space, requiring the agent to search for relevant data. In humans, that face the same problem when sounds, images and smells are presented to their…
For robots with low rigidity, determining the robot's state based solely on kinematics is challenging. This is particularly crucial for a robot whose entire body is in contact with the environment, as accurate state estimation is essential…
In this paper, we address the problem of autonomous multi-robot mapping, exploration and navigation in unknown, GPS-denied indoor or urban environments using a swarm of robots equipped with directional sensors with limited sensing…
Topological localization is a fundamental problem in mobile robotics, since robots must be able to determine their position in order to accomplish tasks. Visual localization and place recognition are challenging due to perceptual ambiguity,…
Traditional approaches for active mapping focus on building geometric maps. For most real-world applications, however, actionable information is related to semantically meaningful objects in the environment. We propose an approach to the…
Current technological advances open up new opportunities for bringing human-machine interaction to a new level of human-centered cooperation. In this context, a key issue is the semantic understanding of the environment in order to enable…
Collaboration is a central theme in multi-robot systems as tasks and demands increasingly require capabilities that go beyond what any one individual robot possesses. Yet, despite extensive work on cooperative control and coordinated…
Robots are increasingly present in human spaces, such as for conducting deliveries in hospitals, interacting with visitors at museums, and stocking items in warehouses. To ensure the seamless integration of robots into these spaces, a new…
A sensor is a device that converts a physical parameter or an environmental characteristic (e.g., temperature, distance, speed, etc.) into a signal that can be digitally measured and processed to perform specific tasks. Mobile robots need…
Multirobot systems for covering environments are increasingly used in applications like cleaning, industrial inspection, patrolling, and precision agriculture. The problem of covering a given environment using multiple robots can be…
Whether a robot can perform some specific task depends on several aspects, including the robot's sensors and the plans it possesses. We are interested in search algorithms that treat plans and sensor designs jointly, yielding…
Where am I? This is one of the most critical questions that any intelligent system should answer to decide whether it navigates to a previously visited area. This problem has long been acknowledged for its challenging nature in simultaneous…
Climate change is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century, and many in the robotics community are looking for ways to contribute. This paper presents a roadmap for climate-relevant robotics research, identifying high-impact…
We consider problems in which robots conspire to present a view of the world that differs from reality. The inquiry is motivated by the problem of validating robot behavior physically despite there being a discrepancy between the robots we…
Safe human-robot interactions require robots to be able to learn how to behave appropriately in \sout{humans' world} \rev{spaces populated by people} and thus to cope with the challenges posed by our dynamic and unstructured environment,…
Unlike traditional cameras, event cameras measure changes in light intensity and report differences. This paper examines the conditions necessary for other traditional sensors to admit eventified versions that provide adequate information…
Nowadays service robots are leaving the structured and completely known environments and entering human-centric settings. For these robots, object perception and grasping are two challenging tasks due to the high demand for accurate and…