Related papers: Advancing a taxonomy for proxemics in robot social…

How are robots becoming smarter at interacting with their surroundings? Recent advances have reshaped how robots use tactile sensing to perceive and engage with the world. Tactile sensing is a game-changer, allowing robots to embed…

Human movement prediction is difficult as humans naturally exhibit complex behaviors that can change drastically from one environment to the next. In order to alleviate this issue, we propose a prediction framework that decouples short-term…

Humanoid robots dynamically navigate an environment by interacting with it via contact wrenches exerted at intermittent contact poses. Therefore, it is important to consider dynamics when planning a contact sequence. Traditional contact…

Robot-assisted navigation is a perfect example of a class of applications requiring flexible control approaches. When the human is reliable, the robot should concede space to their initiative. When the human makes inappropriate choices the…

Robot navigation in dense human crowds poses a significant challenge due to the complexity of human behavior in dynamic and obstacle-rich environments. In this work, we propose a dynamic weight adjustment scheme using a neural network to…

The recent adoption of artificial intelligence in robotics has driven the development of algorithms that enable autonomous systems to adapt to complex social environments. In particular, safe and efficient social navigation is a key…

With momentum increasing in the use of social robots as long-term assistive and collaborative partners, humans developing social bonds with these artificial agents appears to be inevitable. In human-human dyads, social bonding plays a…

Machine perception is an important prerequisite for safe interaction and locomotion in dynamic environments. This requires not only the timely perception of surrounding geometries and distances but also the ability to react to changing…

Evolutionary techniques driven by behavioural diversity, such as novelty search, have shown significant potential in evolutionary robotics. These techniques rely on priorly specified behaviour characterisations to estimate the similarity…

This paper investigates the role of communication in improving coordination within robot swarms, focusing on a paradigm where learning and execution occur simultaneously in a decentralized manner. We highlight the role communication can…

For humans and robots to form an effective human-robot team (HRT) there must be sufficient trust between team members throughout a mission. We analyze data from an HRT experiment focused on trust dynamics in teams of one human and two…

Robot swarms often exhibit emergent behaviors that are fascinating to observe; however, it is often difficult to predict what swarm behaviors can emerge under a given set of agent capabilities. We seek to efficiently leverage human input to…

Designing robots capable of generating interpretable behavior is a prerequisite for achieving effective human-robot collaboration. This means that the robots need to be capable of generating behavior that aligns with human expectations and,…

Robotic guidance systems have shown promise in supporting blind and visually impaired (BVI) individuals with wayfinding and obstacle avoidance. However, most existing systems assume a clear path and do not support a critical aspect of…

Human-robot interaction frequently involves physical proximity or contact. In human-human settings, people flexibly accept, reject, or tolerate such approaches depending on the relationship and context. We explore the design of a robot's…

This paper presents the behaviour control of a service robot for intelligent object search in a domestic environment. A major challenge in service robotics is to enable fetch-and-carry missions that are satisfying for the user in terms of…

From fake social media accounts and generative artificial intelligence chatbots to trading algorithms and self-driving vehicles, robots, bots and algorithms are proliferating and permeating our communication channels, social interactions,…

For a robot to be called socially intelligent, it must be able to infer users internal states from their current behaviour, predict the users future behaviour, and if required, respond appropriately. In this work, we investigate how robots…

Social robot navigation can be helpful in various contexts of daily life but requires safe human-robot interactions and efficient trajectory planning. While modeling pairwise relations has been widely studied in multi-agent interacting…

Adapting to social conventions is an unavoidable requirement for the acceptance of assistive and social robots. While the scientific community broadly accepts that assistive robots and social robot companions are unlikely to have widespread…