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Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) stands as a key research problem of Embodied AI, aiming at enabling agents to navigate in unseen environments following linguistic instructions. In this field, generalization is a long-standing…
Autonomous driving systems require a comprehensive understanding of the environment, achieved by extracting visual features essential for perception, planning, and control. However, models trained solely on single-task objectives or generic…
Autonomous navigation in off-road environments remains a significant challenge in field robotics, particularly for Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) tasked with search and rescue, exploration, and surveillance. Effective long-range planning…
The navigation of robots in dynamic urban environments, requires elaborated anticipative strategies for the robot to avoid collisions with dynamic objects, like bicycles or pedestrians, and to be human aware. We have developed and analyzed…
Incremental decision making in real-world environments is one of the most challenging tasks in embodied artificial intelligence. One particularly demanding scenario is Vision and Language Navigation~(VLN) which requires visual and natural…
Recent advances in visual analytics have enabled us to learn from user interactions and uncover analytic goals. These innovations set the foundation for actively guiding users during data exploration. Providing such guidance will become…
Robotic imitation learning has advanced from solving static tasks to addressing dynamic interaction scenarios, but testing and evaluation remain costly and challenging due to the need for real-time interaction with dynamic environments. We…
Navigation foundation models trained on massive webscale data enable agents to generalize across diverse environments and embodiments. However, these models trained solely on offline data, often lack the capacity to reason about the…
Being able to perceive the semantics and the spatial structure of the environment is essential for visual navigation of a household robot. However, most existing works only employ visual backbones pre-trained either with independent images…
Social navigation requires robots to act safely in dynamic human environments. Effective behavior demands thinking ahead: reasoning about how the scene and pedestrians evolve under different robot actions rather than reacting to current…
We address the challenge of task-oriented navigation in unstructured and unknown environments, where robots must incrementally build and reason on rich, metric-semantic maps in real time. Since tasks may require clarification or…
Robotic guidance systems have shown promise in supporting blind and visually impaired (BVI) individuals with wayfinding and obstacle avoidance. However, most existing systems assume a clear path and do not support a critical aspect of…
Autonomous mobile robots need to perceive the environments with their onboard sensors (e.g., LiDARs and RGB cameras) and then make appropriate navigation decisions. In order to navigate human-inhabited public spaces, such a navigation task…
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…
Learning strategic robot behavior -- like that required in pursuit-evasion interactions -- under real-world constraints is extremely challenging. It requires exploiting the dynamics of the interaction, and planning through both physical…
Humans can perform complex tasks with long-term objectives by planning, reasoning, and forecasting outcomes of actions. For embodied agents to achieve similar capabilities, they must gain knowledge of the environment transferable to novel…
The ability to perform effective planning is crucial for building an instruction-following agent. When navigating through a new environment, an agent is challenged with (1) connecting the natural language instructions with its progressively…
To cooperate with humans effectively, virtual agents need to be able to understand and execute language instructions. A typical setup to achieve this is with a scripted teacher which guides a virtual agent using language instructions.…
Although exploratory behaviors are ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, their computational underpinnings are still largely unknown. Behavioral Psychology has identified learning as a primary drive underlying many exploratory behaviors.…
Autonomously navigating a robot in everyday crowded spaces requires solving complex perception and planning challenges. When using only monocular image sensor data as input, classical two-dimensional planning approaches cannot be used.…