Related papers: ProVox: Personalization and Proactive Planning for…
Assistive robot arms can help humans by partially automating their desired tasks. Consider an adult with motor impairments controlling an assistive robot arm to eat dinner. The robot can reduce the number of human inputs -- and how precise…
Voice-based communication is often cited as one of the most `natural' ways in which humans and robots might interact, and the recent availability of accurate automatic speech recognition and intelligible speech synthesis has enabled…
We claim that navigation in human environments can be viewed as cooperative activity especially in constrained situations. Humans concurrently aid and comply with each other while moving in a shared space. Cooperation helps pedestrians to…
Robots that cooperate with humans must be effective at communicating with them. However, people have varied preferences for communication based on many contextual factors, such as culture, environment, and past experience. To communicate…
Intelligent robots and machines are becoming pervasive in human populated environments. A desirable capability of these agents is to respond to goal-oriented commands by autonomously constructing task plans. However, such autonomy can add…
High-level human instructions often correspond to behaviors with multiple implicit steps. In order for robots to be useful in the real world, they must be able to to reason over both motions and intermediate goals implied by human…
Soft robots are naturally designed to perform safe interactions with their environment, like locomotion and manipulation. In the literature, there are now many concepts, often bio-inspired, to propose new modes of locomotion or grasping.…
Nowadays, robots are found in a growing number of areas where they collaborate closely with humans. Enabled by lightweight materials and safety sensors, these cobots are gaining increasing popularity in domestic care, supporting people with…
Collaborative robots, or cobots, are increasingly integrated into various industrial and service settings to work efficiently and safely alongside humans. However, for effective human-robot collaboration, robots must reason based on human…
We focus on human-robot collaborative transport, in which a robot and a user collaboratively move an object to a goal pose. In the absence of explicit communication, this problem is challenging because it demands tight implicit coordination…
The next step for In-vehicle Conversational Assistants (IVCAs) will be their capability to initiate and automate proactive system interactions throughout journeys. However, diverse drivers make it challenging to design voice interventions…
This paper presents a planning algorithm designed to improve cooperative robot behavior concerning human comfort during forceful human-robot physical interaction. Particularly, we are interested in planning for object grasping and…
In human-robot cooperation, the robot cooperates with humans to accomplish the task together. Existing approaches assume the human has a specific goal during the cooperation, and the robot infers and acts toward it. However, in real-world…
Proactively perceiving others' intentions is a crucial skill to effectively interact in unstructured, dynamic and novel environments. This work proposes a first step towards embedding this skill in support robots for search and rescue…
We consider the human-aware task planning problem where a human-robot team is given a shared task with a known objective to achieve. Recent approaches tackle it by modeling it as a team of independent, rational agents, where the robot plans…
Effective pair programming depends on coordination of attention, cognitive effort, and joint regulation over time, yet most adaptive learning systems remain individual-centric and reactive. This paper introduces ProPACT, a proactive…
Collaborative manipulation is inherently multimodal, with haptic communication playing a central role. When performed by humans, it involves back-and-forth force exchanges between the participants through which they resolve possible…
Humans vary their expressivity when speaking for extended periods to maintain engagement with their listener. Although social robots tend to be deployed with ``expressive'' joyful voices, they lack this long-term variation found in human…
We propose, analyze, and experimentally verify a new proactive approach for robot social navigation driven by the robot's "opinion" for which way and by how much to pass human movers crossing its path. The robot forms an opinion over time…
Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have driven rapid progress in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for robotic manipulation. Although effective in many scenarios, current approaches largely rely on explicit…