Related papers: A General Safety Framework for Autonomous Manipula…
In the past two decades, there has been a continuous rise in the deployment of robots fulfilling social roles that expands across various industries such as guides, service providers, and educators. To establish robots as integral allies in…
A runtime assurance system (RTA) for a given plant enables the exercise of an untrusted or experimental controller while assuring safety with a backup (or safety) controller. The relevant computational design problem is to create a logic…
Ensuring safety in human-robot interaction (HRI) is essential to foster user trust and enable the broader adoption of robotic systems. Traditional safety models primarily rely on sensor-based measures, such as relative distance and…
Robots operating alongside people, particularly in sensitive scenarios such as aiding the elderly with daily tasks or collaborating with workers in manufacturing, must guarantee safety and cultivate user trust. Continuum soft manipulators…
Cyber human interaction is a broad term encompassing the range of interactions that humans can have with technology. While human interaction with fixed and mobile computers is well understood, the world is on the cusp of ubiquitous and…
Robots operating in close proximity to humans rely heavily on human trust to successfully complete their tasks. But what are the real outcomes when this trust is violated? Self-defense law provides a framework for analyzing tangible failure…
Robot accidents are inevitable. Although rare, they have been happening since assembly-line robots were first introduced in the 1960s. But a new generation of social robots are now becoming commonplace. Often with sophisticated embedded…
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…
The increasing demand in artificial intelligence (AI) for models that are both effective and explainable is critical in domains where safety and trust are paramount. In this study, we introduce MIRA, a transparent and interpretable…
Shared autonomy holds promise for improving the usability and accessibility of assistive robotic arms, but current methods often rely on costly expert demonstrations and remain static after pretraining, limiting their ability to handle…
The advancement of robotic systems has revolutionized numerous industries, yet their operation often demands specialized technical knowledge, limiting accessibility for non-expert users. This paper introduces ROSA (Robot Operating System…
In this project, we focus on human-robot interaction in caregiving scenarios like bathing, where physical contact is inevitable and necessary for proper task execution because force must be applied to the skin. Using finite element…
Semi-autonomous vehicles are increasingly serving critical functions in various settings from mining to logistics to defence. A key characteristic of such systems is the presence of the human (drivers) in the control loop. To ensure safety,…
Autonomous navigation is essential for steel bridge inspection robot to monitor and maintain the working condition of steel bridges. Majority of existing robotic solutions requires human support to navigate the robot doing the inspection.…
Human-robot collaborations have been recognized as an essential component for future factories. It remains challenging to properly design the behavior of those co-robots. Those robots operate in dynamic uncertain environment with limited…
Shared autonomy integrates user input with robot autonomy in order to control a robot and help the user to complete a task. Our work aims to improve the performance of such a human-robot team: the robot tries to guide the human towards an…
Due to agile developments in the field of robotics and human-robot interaction, prospective robotic agents are intended to play the role of teammates and partner with humans to perform operations, rather than tools that are replacing humans…
Many robot manipulation tasks require the robot to make and break contact with objects and surfaces. The dynamics of such changing-contact robot manipulation tasks are discontinuous when contact is made or broken, and continuous elsewhere.…
Designing Reinforcement Learning (RL) solutions for real-life problems remains a significant challenge. A major area of concern is safety. "Shielding" is a popular technique to enforce safety in RL by turning user-defined safety…
Ensuring both safety and efficiency in decision-making for autonomous driving systems remains a fundamental challenge. Traditional Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) suffers from unsafe random exploration and slow convergence, while Large…