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Navigation strategies that intentionally incorporate contact with humans (i.e. "contact-based" social navigation) in crowded environments are largely unexplored even though collision-free social navigation is a well studied problem.…
Tactile sensors have been introduced to a wide range of robotic tasks such as robot manipulation to mimic the sense of human touch. However, there has only been a few works that integrate tactile sensing into robot navigation. This paper…
Navigating mobile robots through environments shared with humans is challenging. From the perspective of the robot, humans are dynamic obstacles that must be avoided. These obstacles make the collision-free space nonconvex, which leads to…
Humans can achieve diverse in-hand manipulations, such as object pinching and tool use, which often involve simultaneous contact between the object and multiple fingers. This is still an open issue for robotic hands because such dexterous…
Despite living in an increasingly connected world, social isolation is a prevalent issue today. While social robots have been explored as tools to enhance social connection through companionship, their potential as asynchronous social…
Programming robot behavior in a complex world faces challenges on multiple levels, from dextrous low-level skills to high-level planning and reasoning. Recent pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning ability…
Most existing methods for motion planning of mobile robots involve generating collision-free trajectories. However, these methods focusing solely on contact avoidance may limit the robots' locomotion and can not be applied to tasks where…
The demand for social robots in fields like healthcare, education, and entertainment increases due to their emotional adaptation features. These robots leverage multimodal communication, incorporating speech, facial expressions, and…
Natural language is the most intuitive medium for us to interact with other people when expressing commands and instructions. However, using language is seldom an easy task when humans need to express their intent towards robots, since most…
Frictional contact has been extensively studied as the core underlying behavior of legged locomotion and manipulation, and its nearly-discontinuous nature makes planning and control difficult even when an accurate model of the robot is…
Robotic manipulation research has investigated contact-rich problems and strategies that require robots to intentionally collide with their environment, to accomplish tasks that cannot be handled by traditional collision-free solutions. By…
Simulating deformable objects under rich interactions remains a fundamental challenge for real-to-sim robot manipulation, with dynamics jointly driven by environmental effects and robot actions. Existing simulators rely on predefined…
Assistive robots enable people with disabilities to conduct everyday tasks on their own. However, these tasks can be complex, containing both coarse reaching motions and fine-grained manipulation. For example, when eating, not only does one…
Untangling of structures like ropes and wires by autonomous robots can be useful in areas such as personal robotics, industries and electrical wiring & repairing by robots. This problem can be tackled by using computer vision system in…
Visual navigation by mobile robots is classically tackled through SLAM plus optimal planning, and more recently through end-to-end training of policies implemented as deep networks. While the former are often limited to waypoint planning,…
Operating robots precisely and at high speeds has been a long-standing goal of robotics research. Balancing these competing demands is key to enabling the seamless collaboration of robots and humans and increasing task performance. However,…
The rapid advancement of robotics, spanning expanded capabilities, more intuitive interaction, and more integration into real-world workflows, is reshaping what it means for humans and robots to coexist. Beyond sharing physical space, this…
In this paper, we explore the design and use of conversational telepresence robots to help homebound older adults interact with the external world. An initial needfinding study (N=8) using video vignettes revealed older adults' experiential…
In this paper, we will discuss the design and implementation of three educational robotics workshops that focus on the use of robotics for addressing real-world societal problems. Through the workshops, we aimed to investigate how the…
As robots move from the laboratory into the real world, motion planning will need to account for model uncertainty and risk. For robot motions involving intermittent contact, planning for uncertainty in contact is especially important, as…