Related papers: A short methodological review on social robot navi…
Collective decision-making is an essential capability of large-scale multi-robot systems to establish autonomy on the swarm level. A large portion of literature on collective decision-making in swarm robotics focuses on discrete decisions…
Social navigation in densely populated dynamic environments poses a significant challenge for autonomous mobile robots, requiring advanced strategies for safe interaction. Existing reinforcement learning (RL)-based methods require over…
AI safety benchmarks are pivotal for safety in advanced AI systems; however, they have significant technical, epistemic, and sociotechnical shortcomings. We present a review of 210 safety benchmarks that maps out common challenges in safety…
Social robots are becoming increasingly diverse in their design, behavior, and usage. In this chapter, we provide a broad-ranging overview of the main characteristics that arise when one considers social robots and their interactions with…
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…
In densely populated environments, socially compliant navigation is critical for autonomous robots as driving close to people is unavoidable. This manner of social navigation is challenging given the constraints of human comfort and social…
Service and assistive robots are increasingly being deployed in dynamic social environments; however, ensuring transparent and explainable interactions remains a significant challenge. This paper presents a multimodal explainability module…
Robots are experiencing a revolution as they permeate many aspects of our daily lives, from performing house maintenance to infrastructure inspection, from efficiently warehousing goods to autonomous vehicles, and more. This technical…
Towards human-robot coexistence, socially aware navigation is significant for mobile robots. Yet existing studies on this area focus mainly on path efficiency and pedestrian collision avoidance, which are essential but represent only a…
Climate change is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century, and many in the robotics community are looking for ways to contribute. This paper presents a roadmap for climate-relevant robotics research, identifying high-impact…
We contribute Bi3, a dataset of social robot navigation among groups of people in a constrained lab space. Compared to prior data collection efforts for social robot navigation, our dataset is unique in that it features: an original…
A critical use case of SLAM for mobile assistive robots is to support localization during a navigation-based task. Current SLAM benchmarks overlook the significance of repeatability (precision), despite its importance in real-world…
The robot learning community has made great strides in recent years, proposing new architectures and showcasing impressive new capabilities; however, the dominant metric used in the literature, especially for physical experiments, is…
Benchmarking, standards and certification are closely related processes. Standards can provide normative requirements that robotics and AI systems may or may not conform to. Certification generally relies upon conformance with one or more…
Planning smooth and energy-efficient motions for wheeled mobile robots is a central task for applications ranging from autonomous driving to service and intralogistic robotics. Over the past decades, a wide variety of motion planners, steer…
Semantic navigation is necessary to deploy mobile robots in uncontrolled environments like our homes, schools, and hospitals. Many learning-based approaches have been proposed in response to the lack of semantic understanding of the…
Robots operating in human-populated environments must navigate safely and efficiently while minimizing social disruption. Achieving this requires estimating crowd movement to avoid congested areas in real-time. Traditional microscopic…
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…
Fully autonomous mobile robots have a multitude of potential applications, but guaranteeing robust navigation performance remains an open research problem. For many tasks such as repeated infrastructure inspection, item delivery, or…
As mobile robots are increasingly deployed in human environments, enabling them to predict how people perceive them is critical for socially adaptable navigation. Predicting perceptions is challenging for two main reasons: (1) HRI…