Related papers: Social Zone as a Barrier Function for Socially-Com…
This paper proposes a dynamic game formulation for cooperative human-robot navigation in shared workspaces with obstacles, where the human and robot jointly satisfy shared safety constraints while pursuing a common task. A key contribution…
Navigating mobile robots through environments shared with humans is challenging. From the perspective of the robot, humans are dynamic obstacles that must be avoided. These obstacles make the collision-free space nonconvex, which leads to…
Contemporary robots are increasingly mimicking human social behaviours to facilitate interaction, such as smiling to signal approachability, or hesitating before taking an action to allow people time to react. Such techniques can activate a…
It is important for socially assistive robots to be able to recognize when a user needs and wants help. Such robots need to be able to recognize human needs in a real-time manner so that they can provide timely assistance. We propose an…
Aerial robots have the potential to play a crucial role in assisting humans with complex and dangerous tasks. Nevertheless, the future industry demands innovative solutions to streamline the interaction process between humans and drones to…
In mobile robot navigation, despite advancements, the generation of optimal paths often disrupts pedestrian areas. To tackle this, we propose three key contributions to improve human-robot coexistence in shared spaces. Firstly, we have…
In this work, we aim to enable legged robots to learn how to interpret human social cues and produce appropriate behaviors through physical human guidance. However, learning through physical engagement can place a heavy burden on users when…
As robotic systems become more and more capable of assisting humans in their everyday lives, we must consider the opportunities for these artificial agents to make their human collaborators feel unsafe or to treat them unfairly. Robots can…
Most current approaches to social navigation focus on the trajectory and position of participants in the interaction. Our current work on the topic focuses on integrating gaze into social navigation, both to cue nearby pedestrians as to the…
Ensuring safe interactions in human-centric environments requires robots to understand and adhere to constraints recognized by humans as "common sense" (e.g., "moving a cup of water above a laptop is unsafe as the water may spill" or…
We consider the design space available for social robots in terms of a hierarchy of functional definitions: the essential properties in terms of a locus of interaction, autonomy, intelligence, awareness of humans as possessors of mental…
The evaluation of robot capabilities to navigate human crowds is essential to conceive new robots intended to operate in public spaces. This paper initiates the development of a benchmark tool to evaluate such capabilities; our long term…
Mobile robot navigation in dynamic human environments requires policies that balance adaptability to diverse behaviors with compliance to safety constraints. We hypothesize that integrating data-driven rewards with rule-based objectives…
Robot navigation in dynamic environments shared with humans is an important but challenging task, which suffers from performance deterioration as the crowd grows. In this paper, multi-subgoal robot navigation approach based on deep…
For successful goal-directed human-robot interaction, the robot should adapt to the intentions and actions of the collaborating human. This can be supported by musculoskeletal or data-driven human models, where the former are limited to…
Smooth and seamless robot navigation while interacting with humans depends on predicting human movements. Forecasting such human dynamics often involves modeling human trajectories (global motion) or detailed body joint movements (local…
Robots operating in human-populated environments must navigate safely and efficiently while minimizing social disruption. Achieving this requires estimating crowd movement to avoid congested areas in real-time. Traditional microscopic…
We present a real-time, data-driven algorithm to enhance the social-invisibility of robots within crowds. Our approach is based on prior psychological research, which reveals that people notice and--importantly--react negatively to groups…
We present a Pedestrian Dominance Model (PDM) to identify the dominance characteristics of pedestrians for robot navigation. Through a perception study on a simulated dataset of pedestrians, PDM models the perceived dominance levels of…
The anticipation of human behavior is a crucial capability for robots to interact with humans safely and efficiently. We employ a smart edge sensor network to provide global observations, future predictions, and goal information to…