Related papers: Advancing a taxonomy for proxemics in robot social…
For robotic vehicles to navigate safely and efficiently in pedestrian-rich environments, it is important to model subtle human behaviors and navigation rules (e.g., passing on the right). However, while instinctive to humans, socially…
Humanoid robots rely on multi-contact planners to navigate a diverse set of environments, including those that are unstructured and highly constrained. To synthesize stable multi-contact plans within a reasonable time frame, most planners…
Wearable supernumerary robotic limbs (SRLs) sit at the intersection of human augmentation and embodied AI, transforming into extensions of the human body. However, their movements within the intimate near-body space raise unresolved…
The popularity of mobile robots has been steadily growing, with these robots being increasingly utilized to execute tasks previously completed by human workers. For bipedal robots to see this same success, robust autonomous navigation…
Purpose of Review: The field of humanoid robotics, perception plays a fundamental role in enabling robots to interact seamlessly with humans and their surroundings, leading to improved safety, efficiency, and user experience. This…
Notwithstanding the tremendous progress that is taking place in spoken language technology, effective speech-based human-robot interaction still raises a number of important challenges. Not only do the fields of robotics and spoken language…
This paper presents a real-time programming and parameter reconfiguration method for autonomous underwater robots in human-robot collaborative tasks. Using a set of intuitive and meaningful hand gestures, we develop a syntactically simple…
For the best human-robot interaction experience, the robot's navigation policy should take into account personal preferences of the user. In this paper, we present a learning framework complemented by a perception pipeline to train a depth…
Human-centered environments are rich with a wide variety of spatial relations between everyday objects. For autonomous robots to operate effectively in such environments, they should be able to reason about these relations and generalize…
In evolutionary robotics, jointly optimising the design and the controller of robots is a challenging task due to the huge complexity of the solution space formed by the possible combinations of body and controller. We focus on the…
Mobile robotics is a research area that has witnessed incredible advances for the last decades. Robot navigation is an essential task for mobile robots. Many methods are proposed for allowing robots to navigate within different…
Long-term planning for robots operating in domestic environments poses unique challenges due to the interactions between humans, objects, and spaces. Recent advancements in trajectory planning have leveraged vision-language models (VLMs) to…
Mimicking human ability to forecast future positions or interpret complex interactions in urban scenarios, such as streets, shopping malls or squares, is essential to develop socially compliant robots or self-driving cars. Autonomous…
We present a comprehensive framework for studying and leveraging morphological symmetries in robotic systems. These are intrinsic properties of the robot's morphology, frequently observed in animal biology and robotics, which stem from the…
For some years now, the use of social, anthropomorphic robots in various situations has been on the rise. These are robots developed to interact with humans and are equipped with corresponding extremities. They already support human users…
As robots take on roles in our society, it is important that their appearance, behaviour and personality are appropriate for the job they are given and are perceived favourably by the people with whom they interact. Here, we provide an…
The representation of the knowledge needed by a robot to perform complex tasks is restricted by the limitations of perception. One possible way of overcoming this situation and designing "knowledgeable" robots is to rely on the interaction…
Social navigation in densely populated dynamic environments poses a significant challenge for autonomous mobile robots, requiring advanced strategies for safe interaction. Existing reinforcement learning (RL)-based methods require over…
Mapping and navigation have gone hand-in-hand since long before robots existed. Maps are a key form of communication, allowing someone who has never been somewhere to nonetheless navigate that area successfully. In the context of…
Navigating in human-filled public spaces is a critical challenge for deploying autonomous robots in real-world environments. This paper introduces NaviDIFF, a novel Hamiltonian-constrained socially-aware navigation framework designed to…