Related papers: Semantically Safe Robot Manipulation: From Semanti…
Service and assistive robots are increasingly being deployed in dynamic social environments; however, ensuring transparent and explainable interactions remains a significant challenge. This paper presents a multimodal explainability module…
As drones and autonomous cars become more widespread it is becoming increasingly important that robots can operate safely under realistic conditions. The noisy information fed into real systems means that robots must use estimates of the…
Robots are more capable of achieving manipulation tasks for everyday activities than before. But the safety of manipulation skills that robots employ is still an open problem. Considering all possible failures during skill learning…
Mobile robots have gained increased importance within industrial tasks such as commissioning, delivery or operation in hazardous environments. The ability to autonomously navigate safely especially within dynamic environments, is paramount…
We introduce a novel simulation-based approach to identify hazards that result from unexpected worker behavior in human-robot collaboration. Simulation-based safety testing must take into account the fact that human behavior is variable and…
A major challenge to deploying robots widely is navigation in human-populated environments, commonly referred to as social robot navigation. While the field of social navigation has advanced tremendously in recent years, the fair evaluation…
Many of today's robot perception systems aim at accomplishing perception tasks that are too simplistic and too hard. They are too simplistic because they do not require the perception systems to provide all the information needed to…
When AI interacts with the physical world -- as a robot or an assistive agent -- new safety challenges emerge beyond those of purely ``digital AI". In such interactions, the potential for physical harm is direct and immediate. How well do…
Ambiguities are inevitable in human-robot interaction, especially when a robot follows user instructions in a large, shared space. For example, if a user asks the robot to find an object in a home environment with underspecified…
Intelligent embodied agents (e.g. robots) need to perform complex semantic tasks in unfamiliar environments. Among many skills that the agents need to possess, building and maintaining a semantic map of the environment is most crucial in…
Scene understanding is an important capability for robots acting in unstructured environments. While most SLAM approaches provide a geometrical representation of the scene, a semantic map is necessary for more complex interactions with the…
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…
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…
The global rise in the number of people with physical disabilities, in part due to improvements in post-trauma survivorship and longevity, has amplified the demand for advanced assistive technologies to improve mobility and independence.…
The exponentially increasing advances in robotics and machine learning are facilitating the transition of robots from being confined to controlled industrial spaces to performing novel everyday tasks in domestic and urban environments. In…
The safety of mobile robots in dynamic environments is predicated on making sure that they do not collide with obstacles. In support of such safety arguments, we analyze and formally verify a series of increasingly powerful safety…
This study addresses the challenge of integrating social norms into robot navigation, which is essential for ensuring that robots operate safely and efficiently in human-centric environments. Social norms, often unspoken and implicitly…
Until recently, robotics safety research was predominantly about collision avoidance and hazard reduction in the immediate vicinity of a robot. Since the advent of large vision and language models (VLMs), robots are now also capable of…
We present a context classification pipeline to allow a robot to change its navigation strategy based on the observed social scenario. Socially-Aware Navigation considers social behavior in order to improve navigation around people. Most of…
This paper addresses the problem of planning a safe (i.e., collision-free) trajectory from an initial state to a goal region when the obstacle space is a-priori unknown and is incrementally revealed online, e.g., through line-of-sight…