Related papers: WanderGuide: Indoor Map-less Robotic Guide for Exp…
Assistive robotic systems have shown growing potential to improve the quality of life of those with disabilities. As researchers explore the automation of various caregiving tasks, considerations for how the technology can still preserve…
Robots navigating complex environments must manage uncertainty from sensor noise, environmental changes, and incomplete information, with different tasks requiring varying levels of precision in different areas. For example, precise…
The exploration problem in the discrete universe, using identical oblivious asynchronous robots without direct communication, has been well investigated. These robots have sensors that allow them to see their environment and move…
Mapless navigation has emerged as a promising approach for enabling autonomous robots to navigate in environments where pre-existing maps may be inaccurate, outdated, or unavailable. In this work, we propose an image-based local…
State-of-the-art natural-language-driven autonomous-navigation systems generally lack the ability to operate in real unknown environments without crutches, such as having a map of the environment in advance or requiring a strict syntactic…
This project proposes a bioinspired multi-robot system using Distributed Optimization for efficient exploration and mapping of unknown environments. Each robot explores its environment and creates a map, which is afterwards put together to…
Large language model (LLM) powered chatbots are primarily text-based today, and impose a large interactional cognitive load, especially for exploratory or sensemaking tasks such as planning a trip or learning about a new city. Because the…
Ensuring accessible pedestrian navigation requires reasoning about both semantic and spatial aspects of complex urban scenes, a challenge that existing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) struggle to meet. Although these models can…
Navigating safely in urban environments remains a challenging problem for autonomous vehicles. Occlusion and limited sensor range can pose significant challenges to safely navigate among pedestrians and other vehicles in the environment.…
Various robot navigation methods have been developed, but they are mainly based on Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), reinforcement learning, etc., which require prior map construction or learning. In this study, we consider the…
In this paper we introduce a novel approach that enables users to interact with a mobile robot in a natural manner. The proposed interaction system does not require any specific infrastructure or device, but relies on commonly utilized…
Humans are known to construct cognitive maps of their everyday surroundings using a variety of perceptual inputs. As such, when a human is asked for directions to a particular location, their wayfinding capability in converting this…
Robots navigating in human environments should use language to ask for assistance and be able to understand human responses. To study this challenge, we introduce Cooperative Vision-and-Dialog Navigation, a dataset of over 2k embodied,…
The most common way for robots to handle environmental information is by using maps. At present, each kind of data is hosted on a separate map, which complicates planning because a robot attempting to perform a task needs to access and…
The guiding task of a mobile robot requires not only human-aware navigation, but also appropriate yet timely interaction for active instruction. State-of-the-art tour-guide models limit their socially-aware consideration to adapting to…
In this paper, we propose several solutions to guide an older adult along a safe path using a robotic walking assistant (the c-Walker). We consider four different possibilities to execute the task. One of them is mechanical, with the…
While assistive robots have much potential to help older people with frailty-related needs, there are few in use. There is a gap between what is developed in laboratories and what would be viable in real-world contexts. Through a series of…
We consider the navigation of mobile robots in crowded environments, for which onboard sensing of the crowd is typically limited by occlusions. We address the problem of inferring the human occupancy in the space around the robot, in blind…
Telepresence robots can be used to support users to navigate an environment remotely and share the visiting experience with their social partners. Although such systems allow users to see and hear the remote environment and communicate with…
One of the most important barriers toward a widespread use of mobile robots in unstructured and human populated work environments is the ability to plan a safe path. In this paper, we propose to delegate this activity to a human operator…