Related papers: A General Safety Framework for Autonomous Manipula…
It is critical to ensure safety for humanoid robots in real-world applications without compromising performance. In this paper, we consider the problem of dexterous safety, featuring limb-level geometry constraints for avoiding both…
As high-speed, agile robots become more commonplace, these robots will have the potential to better aid and collaborate with humans. However, due to the increased agility and functionality of these robots, close collaboration with humans…
Mobile manipulation tasks are one of the key challenges in the field of search and rescue (SAR) robotics requiring robots with flexible locomotion and manipulation abilities. Since the tasks are mostly unknown in advance, the robot has to…
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…
Soft robotics focuses on designing robots with highly deformable materials, allowing them to adapt and operate safely and reliably in unstructured and variable environments. While soft robots offer increased compliance over rigid body…
This paper presents a Human-Robot Blind Handover architecture within the context of Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC). The focus lies on a blind handover scenario where the operator is intentionally faced away, focused in a task, and requires…
Robots are increasingly working alongside people, delivering food to patrons in restaurants or helping workers on assembly lines. These scenarios often involve object handovers between the person and the robot. To achieve safe and efficient…
Passivity is necessary for robots to fluidly collaborate and interact with humans physically. Nevertheless, due to the unconstrained nature of passivity-based impedance control laws, the robot is vulnerable to infeasible and unsafe…
Collaborative robots can relief human operators from excessive efforts during payload lifting activities. Modelling the human partner allows the design of safe and efficient collaborative strategies. In this paper, we present a control…
Autonomous grasping remains challenging as unlike humans, robots do not possess a sophisticated sensing nor delicate interaction capability with the real environment. Among other efforts that tried to close the gap between them,…
While much research explores improving robot capabilities, there is a deficit in researching how robots are expected to perform tasks safely, especially in high-risk problem domains. Robots must earn the trust of human operators in order to…
In industrial applications, complex tasks require human collaboration since the robot doesn't have enough dexterity. However, the robots are still implemented as tools and not as collaborative intelligent systems. To ensure safety in the…
This paper presents Surena-V, a humanoid robot designed to enhance human-robot collaboration capabilities. The robot features a range of sensors, including barometric tactile sensors in its hands, to facilitate precise environmental…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved impressive performance in robotics and autonomous systems (RAS). A key challenge to its deployment in real-life operations is the presence of spuriously unsafe DRL policies. Unexplored states…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is capable of sophisticated motion planning and control for robots in uncertain environments. However, state-of-the-art deep RL approaches typically lack safety guarantees, especially when the robot and…
Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability is a rigorous mathematical framework that enables robots to simultaneously detect unsafe states and generate actions that prevent future failures. While in theory, HJ reachability can synthesize safe…
Ensuring responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI) has become imperative as autonomous systems increasingly influence critical societal domains. However, the concept of trustworthy AI remains broad and multi-faceted. This thesis…
The need to increase the flexibility of production lines is calling for robots to collaborate with human workers. However, existing interactive industrial robots only guarantee intrinsic safety (reduce collision impact), but not interactive…
Robot-assisted navigation is a perfect example of a class of applications requiring flexible control approaches. When the human is reliable, the robot should concede space to their initiative. When the human makes inappropriate choices the…
Robots have gained relevance in society, increasingly performing critical tasks. Nonetheless, robot security is being underestimated. Robotics security is a complex landscape, which often requires a cross-disciplinar perspective to which…