Related papers: Updating Robot Safety Representations Online from …
Robot navigation methods allow mobile robots to operate in applications such as warehouses or hospitals. While the environment in which the robot operates imposes requirements on its navigation behavior, most existing methods do not allow…
Human-robot interactions have been recognized to be a key element of future industrial collaborative robots (co-robots). Unlike traditional robots that work in structured and deterministic environments, co-robots need to operate in highly…
Bridging the gap between natural language commands and autonomous execution in unstructured environments remains an open challenge for robotics. This requires robots to perceive and reason over the current task scene through multiple…
Self-adaptive robots operate in dynamic, unpredictable environments where unaddressed uncertainties can lead to safety violations and operational failures. However, systematically identifying and analyzing these uncertainties, including…
Recent years have seen an increasing number of applications that have a natural language interface, either in the form of chatbots or via personal assistants such as Alexa (Amazon), Google Assistant, Siri (Apple), and Cortana (Microsoft).…
Vision-language-action models (VLAs) show potential as generalist robot policies. However, these models pose extreme safety challenges during real-world deployment, including the risk of harm to the environment, the robot itself, and…
As assistive and collaborative robots become more ubiquitous in the real-world, we need to develop interfaces and controllers that are safe for users to build trust and encourage adoption. In this Blue Sky paper, we discuss the need for…
When humans design cost or goal specifications for robots, they often produce specifications that are ambiguous, underspecified, or beyond planners' ability to solve. In these cases, corrections provide a valuable tool for human-in-the-loop…
Contemporary approaches to perception, planning, estimation, and control have allowed robots to operate robustly as our remote surrogates in uncertain, unstructured environments. This progress now creates an opportunity for robots to…
Autonomous robots operating in dynamic environments should identify and report anomalies. Embodying proactive mitigation improves safety and operational continuity. This paper presents a multimodal anomaly detection and mitigation system…
We study a human-robot collaborative transportation task in presence of obstacles. The task for each agent is to carry a rigid object to a common target position, while safely avoiding obstacles and satisfying the compliance and actuation…
Voice is an essential modality for human-robot interaction (HRI). The way a robot sounds plays a central role in shaping how humans perceive and engage with it, influencing factors such as intelligibility, understandability, and likability.…
One of the current trends in robotics is to employ large language models (LLMs) to provide non-predefined command execution and natural human-robot interaction. It is useful to have an environment map together with its language…
As social robots become increasingly prevalent in day-to-day environments, they will participate in conversations and appropriately manage the information shared with them. However, little is known about how robots might appropriately…
An outstanding challenge with safety methods for human-robot interaction is reducing their conservatism while maintaining robustness to variations in human behavior. In this work, we propose that robots use confidence-aware game-theoretic…
Robots that physically interact with their surroundings, in order to accomplish some tasks or assist humans in their activities, require to exploit contact forces in a safe and proficient manner. Impedance control is considered as a…
Recent advancements have enabled human-robot collaboration through physical assistance and verbal guidance. However, limitations persist in coordinating robots' physical motions and speech in response to real-time changes in human behavior…
Robot manipulation policies, while central to the promise of physical AI, are highly vulnerable in the presence of external variations in the real world. Diagnosing these vulnerabilities is hindered by two key challenges: (i) the relevant…
Recently the field of Human-Robot Interaction gained popularity, due to the wide range of possibilities of how robots can support humans during daily tasks. One form of supportive robots are socially assistive robots which are specifically…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to control robotic systems such as drones, but their risks of causing physical threats and harm in real-world applications remain unexplored. Our study addresses the critical gap in…