Related papers: Safe and Transparent Robots for Human-in-the-Loop …

The Industry 4.0 paradigm emphasizes the crucial benefits that collaborative robots, i.e., robots able to work alongside and together with humans, could bring to the whole production process. In this context, an enabling technology yet…

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…

One central goal of robotics is to enable robots to interact with the physical world. Traditional manipulation studies primarily focus on single robots and relatively small objects. However, factory and domestic environments often require…

This dissertation considers Open-world Robot Manipulation, a manipulation problem where a robot must generalize or quickly adapt to new objects, scenes, or tasks for which it has not been pre-programmed or pre-trained. This dissertation…

In the domain of autonomous household robots, it is of utmost importance for robots to understand human behaviors and provide appropriate services. This requires the robots to possess the capability to analyze complex human behaviors and…

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…

Humanoid robots are envisioned as embodied intelligent agents capable of performing a wide range of human-level loco-manipulation tasks, particularly in scenarios requiring strenuous and repetitive labor. However, learning these skills is…

The field of robotics faces inherent challenges in manipulating deformable objects, particularly in understanding and standardising fabric properties like elasticity, stiffness, and friction. While the significance of these properties is…

Tool use is essential for enabling robots to perform complex real-world tasks, but learning such skills requires extensive datasets. While teleoperation is widely used, it is slow, delay-sensitive, and poorly suited for dynamic tasks. In…

In teleoperation, research has mainly focused on target approaching, where we deal with the more challenging object manipulation task by advancing the shared control technique. Appropriately manipulating an object is challenging due to the…

Remote robot manipulation with human control enables applications where safety and environmental constraints are adverse to humans (e.g. underwater, space robotics and disaster response) or the complexity of the task demands human-level…

Humans excel in grasping and manipulating objects because of their life-long experience and knowledge about the 3D shape and weight distribution of objects. However, the lack of such intuition in robots makes robotic grasping an…

Continued adoption of agricultural robots postulates the farmer's trust in the reliability, robustness and safety of the new technology. This motivates our work on safety assurance of agricultural robots, particularly their ability to…

For successful goal-directed human-robot interaction, the robot should adapt to the intentions and actions of the collaborating human. This can be supported by musculoskeletal or data-driven human models, where the former are limited to…

Robots are being designed to help people in an increasing variety of settings--but seemingly little attention has been given so far to the specific needs of women, who represent roughly half of the world's population but are highly…

Industry 4.0 introduced AI as a transformative solution for modernizing manufacturing processes. Its successor, Industry 5.0, envisions humans as collaborators and experts guiding these AI-driven manufacturing solutions. Developing these…

So-called collaborative robots are a current trend in industrial robotics. However, they still face many problems in practical application such as reduced speed to ascertain their collaborativeness. The standards prescribe two regimes: (i)…

We present an approach for safe and object-independent human-to-robot handovers using real time robotic vision and manipulation. We aim for general applicability with a generic object detector, a fast grasp selection algorithm and by using…

The adoption of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in several human-centred applications provides robots with autonomous decision-making capabilities and adaptability based on the observations of the operating environment. In such scenarios,…

Legged robots can have a unique role in manipulating objects in dynamic, human-centric, or otherwise inaccessible environments. Although most legged robotics research to date typically focuses on traversing these challenging environments,…