Related papers: SPARK: Safe Protective and Assistive Robot Kit
Ensuring safe interactions in human-centric environments requires robots to understand and adhere to constraints recognized by humans as "common sense" (e.g., "moving a cup of water above a laptop is unsafe as the water may spill" or…
Safety-critical control is essential for humanoid robots operating in complex human-centered environments, where physical safety constraints such as joint limits, self-collision avoidance, obstacle avoidance, and workspace boundaries must…
Mobile robotic systems are increasingly used in various work environments to support productivity. However, deploying robots in workplaces crowded by human workers and interacting with them results in safety challenges and concerns, namely…
This review paper focuses on different aspects of perceived safety for a number of autonomous physical systems. This is a major aspect of robotics research, as more and more applications allow human and autonomous systems to share their…
Safe motion planning algorithms are necessary for deploying autonomous robots in unstructured environments. Motion plans must be safe to ensure that the robot does not harm humans or damage any nearby objects. Generating these motion plans…
This paper presents a novel framework that enables real-world humanoid robots to maintain stability while performing human-like motion. Current methods train a policy which allows humanoid robots to follow human body using the massive…
Real-Time systems are essential for promptly responding to external stimuli and completing tasks within predefined time constraints. Ensuring high reliability and robust security in these systems is therefore critical. This requires…
Robotic tasks involving contact interactions pose significant challenges for trajectory optimization due to discontinuous dynamics. Conventional formulations typically assume deterministic contact events, which limit robustness and…
This paper presents SHARP (Supercomputing for High-speed Avoidance and Reactive Planning), a proof-of-concept study demonstrating how high-performance computing (HPC) can enable millisecond-scale responsiveness in robotic control. While…
The success of the human-robot co-worker team in a flexible manufacturing environment where robots learn from demonstration heavily relies on the correct and safe operation of the robot. How this can be achieved is a challenge that requires…
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…
Robots built from soft materials will inherently apply lower environmental forces than their rigid counterparts, and therefore may be more suitable in sensitive settings with unintended contact. However, these robots' applied forces result…
Robot deployment in realistic dynamic environments is a challenging problem despite the fact that robots can be quite skilled at a large number of isolated tasks. One reason for this is that robots are rarely equipped with powerful…
Human safety is critical in applications involving close human-robot interactions (HRI) and is a key aspect of physical compatibility between humans and robots. While measures of human safety in HRI exist, these mainly target industrial…
Humanoid robots are envisioned as general-purpose platforms in human-centered environments, yet their deployment is limited by vulnerability to falls and the risks posed by rigid metal-plastic structures to people and surroundings. We…
Monitoring in-class programming exercises can help instructors identify struggling students and common challenges. However, understanding students' progress can be prohibitively difficult, particularly for multi-faceted problems that…
Existing work in physical robot caregiving is limited in its ability to provide long-term assistance. This is majorly due to (i) lack of well-defined problems, (ii) diversity of tasks, and (iii) limited access to stakeholders from the…
Complex tasks require human collaboration since robots do not have enough dexterity. However, robots are still used as instruments and not as collaborative systems. We are introducing a framework to ensure safety in a human-robot…
Robots can influence people to accomplish their tasks more efficiently: autonomous cars can inch forward at an intersection to pass through, and tabletop manipulators can go for an object on the table first. However, a robot's ability to…
Human-robot collaboration including close physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) is a current trend in industry and also science. The safety guidelines prescribe two modes of safety: (i) power and force limitation and (ii) speed and…