Related papers: SPARK: Safe Protective and Assistive Robot Kit
Robots applications in our daily life increase at an unprecedented pace. As robots will soon operate "out in the wild", we must identify the safety and security vulnerabilities they will face. Robotics researchers and manufacturers focus…
Safety is a crucial property of every robotic platform: any control policy should always comply with actuator limits and avoid collisions with the environment and humans. In reinforcement learning, safety is even more fundamental for…
Autonomous swarms of robots can bring robustness, scalability and adaptability to safety-critical tasks such as search and rescue but their application is still very limited. Using semi-autonomous swarms with human control can bring robot…
Assistive robot manipulators must be able to autonomously pick and place a wide range of novel objects to be truly useful. However, current assistive robots lack this capability. Additionally, assistive systems need to have an interface…
Soft robots offer adaptability and safe interaction with complex environments. Rapid prototyping kits that allow soft robots to be assembled easily will allow different geometries to be explored quickly to suit different environments or to…
Embodied Task Planning with large language models faces safety challenges in real-world environments, where partial observability and physical constraints must be respected. Existing benchmarks often overlook these critical factors,…
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…
Continued adoption of agricultural robots postulates the farmer's trust in the reliability, robustness and safety of the new technology. This motivates our work on safety assurance of agricultural robots, particularly their ability to…
Ensuring safety is crucial to promote the application of robot manipulators in open workspaces. Factors such as sensor errors or unpredictable collisions make the environment full of uncertainties. In this work, we investigate these…
Next generation robots will need to understand intricate and articulated objects as they cooperate in human environments. To do so, these robots will need to move beyond their current abilities--- working with relatively simple objects in a…
Structural inspection in nuclear facilities is vital for maintaining operational safety and integrity. Traditional methods of manual inspection pose significant challenges, including safety risks, high cognitive demands, and potential…
Enabling full robotic workloads with diverse behaviors on mobile systems with stringent resource and energy constraints remains a challenge. In recent years, attempts have been made to deploy single-accelerator-based computing platforms…
Autonomous racing demands safe control of vehicles at their physical limits for extended periods of time, providing insights into advanced vehicle safety systems which increasingly rely on intervention provided by vehicle autonomy.…
The use of pointed or edged tools or objects is one of the most challenging aspects of today's application of physical human-robot interaction (pHRI). One reason for this is that the severity of harm caused by such edged or pointed…
The dynamic response of the legged robot locomotion is non-Lipschitz and can be stochastic due to environmental uncertainties. To test, validate, and characterize the safety performance of legged robots, existing solutions on observed and…
This paper describes RHP Friends, a social humanoid robot developed to enable assistive robotic deployments in human-coexisting environments. As a use-case application, we present its potential use in nursing by extending its capabilities…
In practical applications, the unpredictable movement of obstacles and the imprecise state observation of robots introduce significant uncertainties for the swarm of robots, especially in cluster environments. However, existing methods are…
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…
The integration of collaborative robots into industrial environments has improved productivity, but has also highlighted significant challenges related to operator safety and ergonomics. This paper proposes an innovative framework that…
The interaction of humans and robots in less constrained environments gains a lot of attention lately and the safety of such interaction is of utmost importance. Two ways of risk assessment are prescribed by recent safety standards: (i)…