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With the growing capabilities and pervasiveness of AI systems, societies must collectively choose between reduced human autonomy, endangered democracies and limited human rights, and AI that is aligned to human and social values, nurturing…
Operating under real world conditions is challenging due to the possibility of a wide range of failures induced by execution errors and state uncertainty. In relatively benign settings, such failures can be overcome by retrying or executing…
Driver assistance systems, also called automated driving systems, allow drivers to immerse themselves in non-driving-related tasks. Unfortunately, drivers may not trust the automated driving system, which prevents either handing over the…
The ability of robots to model their own dynamics is key to autonomous planning and learning, as well as for autonomous damage detection and recovery. Traditionally, dynamic models are pre-programmed or learned from external observations.…
As people nowadays increasingly rely on artificial intelligence (AI) to curate information and make decisions, assigning the appropriate amount of trust in automated intelligent systems has become ever more important. However, current…
A trust-aware safe control system for autonomous navigation in the presence of humans, specifically pedestrians, is presented. The system combines model predictive control (MPC) with control barrier functions (CBFs) and trust estimation to…
Human-robot teams will soon be expected to accomplish complex tasks in high-risk and uncertain environments. Here, the human may not necessarily be a robotics expert, but will need to establish a baseline understanding of the robot's…
Assistive robots can potentially improve the quality of life and personal independence of elderly people by supporting everyday life activities. To guarantee a safe and intuitive interaction between human and robot, human intentions need to…
We examine the problem of determining demonstration sufficiency: how can a robot self-assess whether it has received enough demonstrations from an expert to ensure a desired level of performance? To address this problem, we propose a novel…
As environments involving both robots and humans become increasingly common, so does the need to account for people during planning. To plan effectively, robots must be able to respond to and sometimes influence what humans do. This…
Self/other distinction and self-recognition are important skills for interacting with the world, as it allows humans to differentiate own actions from others and be self-aware. However, only a selected group of animals, mainly high order…
Operating robots precisely and at high speeds has been a long-standing goal of robotics research. Balancing these competing demands is key to enabling the seamless collaboration of robots and humans and increasing task performance. However,…
Temporal awareness plays a central role in intelligent behavior by shaping how actions are paced, coordinated, and adapted to changing goals and environments. In contrast, most robot learning algorithms treat time only as a fixed episode…
A key aspect of human cognition is metacognition - the ability to assess one's own knowledge and judgment reliability. While deep learning models can express confidence in their predictions, they often suffer from poor calibration, a…
Autonomous robotic surgery requires deliberation, i.e. the ability to plan and execute a task adapting to uncertain and dynamic environments. Uncertainty in the surgical domain is mainly related to the partial pre-operative knowledge about…
Reinforcement learning is a powerful technique for developing new robot behaviors. However, typical lack of safety guarantees constitutes a hurdle for its practical application on real robots. To address this issue, safe reinforcement…
Autonomous robots operating in open and changing environments cannot always rely on predefined inputs, outputs, and action routines. Although existing learning methods enable robots to improve their performance through environmental…
Handing objects to humans is an essential capability for collaborative robots. Previous research works on human-robot handovers focus on facilitating the performance of the human partner and possibly minimising the physical effort needed to…
Developing and fielding complex systems requires proof that they are reliably correct with respect to their design and operating requirements. Especially for autonomous systems which exhibit unanticipated emergent behavior, fully…
Self-assessment rules play an essential role in safe and effective real-world robotic applications, which verify the feasibility of the selected action before actual execution. But how to utilize the self-assessment results to re-choose…