Related papers: SocRATES: Towards Automated Scenario-based Testing…
As robots across domains start collaborating with humans in shared environments, algorithms that enable them to reason over human intent are important to achieve safe interplay. In our work, we study human intent through the problem of…
Autonomous navigation in unfamiliar environments often relies on geometric mapping and planning strategies that overlook rich semantic cues such as signs, room numbers, and textual labels. We propose a novel semantic navigation framework…
Socially compliant navigation requires robots to move safely and appropriately in human-centered environments by respecting social norms. However, social norms are often ambiguous, and in a single scenario, multiple actions may be equally…
Robots require a semantic understanding of their surroundings to operate in an efficient and explainable way in human environments. In the literature, there has been an extensive focus on object labeling and exhaustive scene graph…
There has been a plethora of work towards improving robot perception and navigation, yet their application in hazardous environments, like during a fire or an earthquake, is still at a nascent stage. We hypothesize two key challenges here:…
Language models (LMs) are increasingly applied to robotic navigation; however, existing benchmarks primarily emphasize navigation success rates while paying limited attention to social compliance. Moreover, relying on large-scale LMs can…
As robots increasingly enter human-centered environments, they must not only be able to navigate safely around humans, but also adhere to complex social norms. Humans often rely on non-verbal communication through gestures and facial…
Autonomous driving systems have witnessed a significant development during the past years thanks to the advance in machine learning-enabled sensing and decision-making algorithms. One critical challenge for their massive deployment in the…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human behavior in experimental settings, but they systematically diverge from human decisions in complex decision-making environments, where participants must anticipate others'…
Service robots are increasingly deployed in diverse and dynamic environments, where both physical layouts and social contexts change over time and across locations. In these unstructured settings, conventional navigation systems that rely…
The field of simulation optimization (SO) encompasses various methods developed to optimize complex, expensive-to-sample stochastic systems. Established methods include, but are not limited to, ranking-and-selection for finite alternatives…
We discuss the process of building semantic maps, how to interactively label entities in them, and how to use them to enable context-aware navigation behaviors in human environments. We utilize planar surfaces, such as walls and tables, and…
Autonomous navigation consists in an agent being able to navigate without human intervention or supervision, it affects both high level planning and low level control. Navigation is at the crossroad of multiple disciplines, it combines…
Developing autonomous driving systems for complex traffic environments requires balancing multiple objectives, such as avoiding collisions, obeying traffic rules, and making efficient progress. In many situations, these objectives cannot be…
When humans navigate a crowed space such as a university campus or the sidewalks of a busy street, they follow common sense rules based on social etiquette. In this paper, we argue that in order to enable the design of new algorithms that…
Behavior prediction remains one of the most challenging tasks in the autonomous vehicle (AV) software stack. Forecasting the future trajectories of nearby agents plays a critical role in ensuring road safety, as it equips AVs with the…
A significant challenge for robot learning research is our ability to accurately measure and compare the performance of robot policies. Benchmarking in robotics is historically challenging due to the stochasticity, reproducibility, and…
Robots are increasingly being used in dynamic environments like workplaces, hospitals, and homes. As a result, interactions with robots must be simple and intuitive, with robots perception adapting efficiently to human-induced changes. This…
Over recent decades, scenarios and scenario-based software/system engineering have been actively employed as essential tools to handle intricate problems, validate requirements, and support stakeholders' communication. However, despite the…
Semantic navigation is the navigation paradigm in which environmental semantic concepts and their relationships are taken into account to plan the route of a mobile robot. This paradigm facilitates the interaction with humans and the…