Related papers: CoBOS: Constraint-Based Online Scheduler for Human…
Safe motion planning algorithms are necessary for deploying autonomous robots in unstructured environments. Motion plans must be safe to ensure that the robot does not harm humans or damage any nearby objects. Generating these motion plans…
Multi-robot systems can be extremely efficient for accomplishing team-wise tasks by acting concurrently and collaboratively. However, most existing methods either assume static task features or simply replan when environmental changes…
Numerical optimization has become a popular approach to plan smooth motion trajectories for robots. However, when sharing space with humans, balancing properly safety, comfort and efficiency still remains challenging. This is notably the…
Robust motion planning is a well-studied problem in the robotics literature, yet current algorithms struggle to operate scalably and safely in the presence of other moving agents, such as humans. This paper introduces a novel framework for…
We propose integrating the edge-computing paradigm into the multi-robot collaborative scheduling to maximize resource utilization for complex collaborative tasks, which many robots must perform together. Examples include collaborative…
This paper proposes a robot action planning scheme that provides an efficient and probabilistically safe plan for a robot interacting with an unconcerned human -- someone who is either unaware of the robot's presence or unwilling to engage…
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…
Zero-order optimization has recently received significant attention for designing optimal trajectories and policies for robotic systems. However, most existing methods (e.g., MPPI, CEM, and CMA-ES) are local in nature, as they rely on…
We focus on the problem of how we can enable a robot to collaborate seamlessly with a human partner, specifically in scenarios where preexisting data is sparse. Much prior work in human-robot collaboration uses observational models of…
To understand and collaborate with humans, robots must account for individual human traits, habits, and activities over time. However, most robotic assistants lack these abilities, as they primarily focus on predefined tasks in structured…
An important factor in developing control models for human-robot collaboration is how acceptable they are to their human partners. One such method for creating acceptable control models is to attempt to mimic human-like behaviour in robots…
Ensuring human safety in collaborative robotics can compromise efficiency because traditional safety measures increase robot cycle time when human interaction is frequent. This paper proposes a safety-aware approach to mitigate efficiency…
The integration of collaborative robots into industrial environments has improved productivity, but has also highlighted significant challenges related to operator safety and ergonomics. This paper proposes an innovative framework that…
Task allocation can enable effective coordination of multi-robot teams to accomplish tasks that are intractable for individual robots. However, existing approaches to task allocation often assume that task requirements or reward functions…
In collaborative robotic applications, human and robot have to work together during a whole shift for executing a sequence of jobs. The performance of the human robot team can be enhanced by scheduling the right tasks to the human and the…
In this paper, we present a novel probabilistic safe control framework for human-robot interaction that combines control barrier functions (CBFs) with conformal risk control to provide formal safety guarantees while considering complex…
Optimal plans in Constrained Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (CPOMDPs) maximize reward objectives while satisfying hard cost constraints, generalizing safe planning under state and transition uncertainty. Unfortunately,…
How can we enable users to create effective, perception-driven task plans for collaborative robots? We conducted a 35-person user study with the Behavior Tree-based CoSTAR system to determine which strategies for end user creation of…
This paper develops a robotic manipulation planner for human-robot collaborative assembly. Unlike previous methods which study an independent and fully AI-equipped autonomous system, this paper explores the subtask distribution between a…
The increasing deployment of robots in co-working scenarios with humans has revealed complex safety and efficiency challenges in the computation robot behavior. Movement among humans is one of the most fundamental -- and yet critical --…