Related papers: A Framework for Semantics-based Situational Awaren…

Endowed with inherent dynamical properties that grant them remarkable ruggedness and adaptability, spherical tensegrity robots stand as prototypical examples of hybrid softrigid designs and excellent mobile platforms. However, path planning…

Robots will bring search and rescue (SaR) in disaster response to another level, in case they can autonomously take over dangerous SaR tasks from humans. A main challenge for autonomous SaR robots is to safely navigate in cluttered…

While much research explores improving robot capabilities, there is a deficit in researching how robots are expected to perform tasks safely, especially in high-risk problem domains. Robots must earn the trust of human operators in order to…

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has significantly advanced in recent years, driving innovation across various fields, especially in robotics. Even though robots can perform complex tasks with increasing autonomy, challenges remain in ensuring…

This paper aims at designing of adaptive framework for supporting collaborative work of different actors in public safety and disaster recovery missions. In such scenarios, firemen and robots interact to each other to reach a common goal;…

What is a good visual representation for autonomous agents? We address this question in the context of semantic visual navigation, which is the problem of a robot finding its way through a complex environment to a target object, e.g. go to…

Ambient-awareness in conjunction with pervasive computing is a significant challenge for system designers. It follows the necessity of gathering raw, massive and heterogeneous environmental data \newrrr{which we} obtained, while middleware…

Sub-symbolic artificial intelligence methods dominate the fields of environment-type classification and Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping. However, a significant area overlooked within these fields is solution transparency for the…

Safety is a critical concern when deploying reinforcement learning agents for realistic tasks. Recently, safe reinforcement learning algorithms have been developed to optimize the agent's performance while avoiding violations of safety…

A robot understands its world through the raw information it senses from its surroundings. This raw information is not suitable as a shared representation between the robot and its user. A semantic map, containing high-level information…

Autonomous robots operating in complex, unstructured environments face significant challenges due to latent, unobserved factors that obscure their understanding of both their internal state and the external world. Addressing this challenge…

This paper addresses the problem of object-goal navigation in autonomous inspections in real-world environments. Object-goal navigation is crucial to enable effective inspections in various settings, often requiring the robot to identify…

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world and embodied settings where safety decisions depend on visual context. However, it remains unclear which visual evidence drives these judgments. We study whether…

As semi-automated vehicles (SAVs) become more common, ensuring effective human-vehicle interaction during control handovers remains a critical safety challenge. Existing studies often rely on single-session simulator experiments or…

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:…

Humans interpret safety not as a binary signal but as a continuous, context- and spatially-dependent notion of risk. While risk is subjective, humans form rational mental models that guide action selection in dynamic environments. This work…

Mainstream autonomous exploration methods usually perform excessively-repeated explorations for the same region, leading to long exploration time and exploration trajectory in complex scenes. To handle this issue, we propose a novel…

Autonomous navigation capabilities play a critical role in service robots operating in environments where human interactions are pivotal, due to the dynamic and unpredictable nature of these environments. However, the variability in human…

This study explores human-robot interaction (HRI) based on a mobile robot and YOLO to increase real-time situation awareness and prevent accidents in the workplace. Using object segmentation, we propose an approach that is capable of…

Mobile robots should be aware of their situation, comprising the deep understanding of their surrounding environment along with the estimation of its own state, to successfully make intelligent decisions and execute tasks autonomously in…