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Recent protocols and metrics for training and evaluating autonomous robot navigation through crowds are inconsistent due to diversified definitions of "social behavior". This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to effectively compare…
The effectiveness of human-robot interaction often hinges on the ability to cultivate engagement - a dynamic process of cognitive involvement that supports meaningful exchanges. Many existing definitions and models of engagement are either…
Emerging applications of robotics, and concerns about their impact, require the research community to put human-centric objectives front-and-center. To meet this challenge, we advocate an interdisciplinary approach, socially cognizant…
This paper explores the concept of engagement, the process by which individuals in an interaction start, maintain and end their perceived connection to one another. The paper reports on one aspect of engagement among human interactors--the…
Robots that navigate through human crowds need to be able to plan safe, efficient, and human predictable trajectories. This is a particularly challenging problem as it requires the robot to predict future human trajectories within a crowd…
This work is dedicated to the study of how uncertainty estimation of the human motion prediction can be embedded into constrained optimization techniques, such as Model Predictive Control (MPC) for the social robot navigation. We propose…
Mobile robot navigation in dynamic human environments requires policies that balance adaptability to diverse behaviors with compliance to safety constraints. We hypothesize that integrating data-driven rewards with rule-based objectives…
This paper presents a novel online framework for safe crowd-robot interaction based on risk-sensitive stochastic optimal control, wherein the risk is modeled by the entropic risk measure. The sampling-based model predictive control relies…
This study proposes social navigation metrics for autonomous agents in air combat, aiming to facilitate their smooth integration into pilot formations. The absence of such metrics poses challenges to safety and effectiveness in mixed…
In order for cooperative robots ("co-robots") to respond to human behaviors accurately and efficiently in human-robot collaboration, interpretation of human actions, awareness of new situations, and appropriate decision making are all…
This work proposes a novel approach to social robot navigation by learning to generate robot controls from a social motion latent space. By leveraging this social motion latent space, the proposed method achieves significant improvements in…
To achieve natural and intuitive interaction with people, HRI frameworks combine a wide array of methods for human perception, intention communication, human-aware navigation and collaborative action. In practice, when encountering…
Understanding human perceptions of robot performance is crucial for designing socially intelligent robots that can adapt to human expectations. Current approaches often rely on surveys, which can disrupt ongoing human-robot interactions. As…
Socially assistive robotics (SAR) has great potential to provide accessible, affordable, and personalized therapeutic interventions for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, human-robot interaction (HRI) methods are still…
Robust motion planning is a well-studied problem in the robotics literature, yet current algorithms struggle to operate scalably and safely in the presence of other moving agents, such as humans. This paper introduces a novel framework for…
Detecting other agents and forecasting their behavior is an integral part of the modern robotic autonomy stack, especially in safety-critical scenarios entailing human-robot interaction such as autonomous driving. Due to the importance of…
Ensuring safety in human-robot interaction (HRI) is essential to foster user trust and enable the broader adoption of robotic systems. Traditional safety models primarily rely on sensor-based measures, such as relative distance and…
Navigation in human-robot shared crowded environments remains challenging, as robots are expected to move efficiently while respecting human motion conventions. However, many existing approaches emphasize safety or efficiency while…
Communication robots often need to initiate conversations with people in public spaces. At the same time, such robots must not disturb pedestrians. To handle these two requirements, an agent needs to estimate the communication desires of…
The use of social robots as instruments for social mediation has been gaining traction in the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). So far, the design of such robots and their behaviors is often driven by technological platforms and…