Related papers: SPARK: Safe Protective and Assistive Robot Kit
Robot teleoperation enables human control over robotic systems in environments where full autonomy is challenging. Recent advancements in low-cost teleoperation devices and VR/AR technologies have expanded accessibility, particularly for…
Humanoid robots are difficult to deploy safely because they have high-dimensional bodies, many collision constraints, and must operate near people and obstacles. Safety filters help by modifying a nominal control action when it may violate…
We investigate the problem of safe control synthesis for systems operating in environments with uncontrollable agents whose dynamics are unknown but coupled with those of the controlled system. This scenario naturally arises in various…
Recent advances in learned control, large-scale simulation, and generative models have accelerated progress toward general-purpose robotic controllers, yet the field still lacks platforms suitable for safe, expressive, long-term deployment…
Autonomous robots are projected to significantly augment the manual workforce, especially in repetitive and hazardous tasks. For a successful deployment of such robots in human environments, it is crucial to guarantee human safety.…
Jointly achieving safety and efficiency in human-robot interaction (HRI) settings is a challenging problem, as the robot's planning objectives may be at odds with the human's own intent and expectations. Recent approaches ensure safe robot…
Robotics has made remarkable hardware strides-from DARPA's Urban and Robotics Challenges to the first humanoid-robot kickboxing tournament-yet commercial autonomy still lags behind progress in machine learning. A major bottleneck is…
Assistive technologies increasingly support independence, accessibility, and safety for older adults, people with disabilities, and individuals requiring continuous care. Two major categories are virtual assistive systems and robotic…
Generating safe motion plans in real-time is necessary for the wide-scale deployment of robots in unstructured and human-centric environments. These motion plans must be safe to ensure humans are not harmed and nearby objects are not…
As of today, robots exhibit impressive agility but also pose potential hazards to humans using/collaborating with them. Consequently, safety is considered the most paramount factor in human-robot interaction (HRI). This paper presents a…
Quadruped mammals coordinate spinal bending and axial compression to enhance locomotion agility and efficiency. However, existing robotic spines typically lack the active compliance required to support such dynamic behaviours. We present…
Robotic and embodied-AI systems have the potential to improve accessibility and quality of care in clinical settings, but their deployment in close physical contact with vulnerable patients introduces significant safety risks. This paper…
Social Robots need to be safe and reliable to share their space with humans. This paper reports on the first results of a research project that aims to create more safe and reliable, intelligent autonomous robots by investigating the…
Safety is a fundamental requirement in any human-robot collaboration scenario. To ensure the safety of users for such scenarios, we propose a novel Virtual Barrier system facilitated by an augmented reality interface. Our system provides…
Shared autonomy provides a framework where a human and an automated system, such as a robot, jointly control the system's behavior, enabling an effective solution for various applications, including human-robot interaction. However, a…
Ensuring safety for human-interactive robotics is important due to the potential for human injury. The key challenge is defining safety in a way that accounts for the complex range of human behaviors without modeling the human as an…
Emergency stop (E-stop) mechanisms are the de facto standard for robot safety. However, for humanoid robots, abruptly cutting power can itself cause catastrophic failures; instead, an emergency stop must execute a predefined fallback…
Robotic grasping requires safe force interaction to prevent a grasped object from being damaged or slipping out of the hand. In this vein, this paper proposes an integrated framework for grasping with formal safety guarantees based on…
The rise of connectivity, digitalization, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing our society and shaping its future development. During this technological and societal revolution, security has been persistently…
With robots leaving factories and entering less controlled domains, possibly sharing the space with humans, safety is paramount and multimodal awareness of the body surface and the surrounding environment is fundamental. Taking inspiration…