Related papers: A short methodological review on social robot navi…
In order for autonomous mobile robots to navigate in human spaces, they must abide by our social norms. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective method to train sequential decision-making policies that are able to respect…
When humans navigate a crowed space such as a university campus or the sidewalks of a busy street, they follow common sense rules based on social etiquette. In this paper, we argue that in order to enable the design of new algorithms that…
Recent advancements in robotics have transformed industries such as manufacturing, logistics, surgery, and planetary exploration. A key challenge is developing efficient motion planning algorithms that allow robots to navigate complex…
Most current approaches to social navigation focus on the trajectory and position of participants in the interaction. Our current work on the topic focuses on integrating gaze into social navigation, both to cue nearby pedestrians as to the…
Mobile robots are increasingly populating homes, hospitals, shopping malls, factory floors, and other human environments. Human society has social norms that people mutually accept; obeying these norms is an essential signal that someone is…
Semantic navigation is the navigation paradigm in which environmental semantic concepts and their relationships are taken into account to plan the route of a mobile robot. This paradigm facilitates the interaction with humans and the…
A wide range of human-robot collaborative applications in diverse domains such as manufacturing, health care, the entertainment industry, and social interactions, require an autonomous robot to follow its human companion. Different working…
The fast-growing demand for fully autonomous robots in shared spaces calls for the development of trustworthy agents that can safely and seamlessly navigate in crowded environments. Recent models for motion prediction show promise in…
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…
We consider a single kinematically controlled robot with a bounded control range. The robot travels in a two-dimensional region supporting an unknown unsteady scalar field. A single sensor provides the field value at the current location of…
Benchmarks offer a scientific way to compare algorithms using objective performance metrics. Good benchmarks have two features: (a) they should be widely useful for many research groups; (b) and they should produce reproducible findings. In…
When we go for a walk with friends, we can observe an interesting effect: From step lengths to arm movements - our movements unconsciously align; they synchronize. Prior research found that this synchronization is a crucial aspect of human…
Characterizing the community structure of complex networks is a key challenge in many scientific fields. Very diverse algorithms and methods have been proposed to this end, many working reasonably well in specific situations. However, no…
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) has been studied mainly in either discrete or continuous settings, with little attention to dynamic, crowded environments. We present HA-VLN 2.0, a unified benchmark introducing explicit social-awareness…
Social navigation datasets are necessary to assess social navigation algorithms and train machine learning algorithms. Most of the currently available datasets target pedestrians' movements as a pattern to be replicated by robots. It can be…
Human-robot teams will soon be expected to accomplish complex tasks in high-risk and uncertain environments. Here, the human may not necessarily be a robotics expert, but will need to establish a baseline understanding of the robot's…
Integrating mobile robots into human society involves the fundamental problem of navigation in crowds. This problem has been studied by considering the behaviour of humans at the level of individuals, but this representation limits the…
With robotics rapidly advancing, more effective human-robot interaction is increasingly needed to realize the full potential of robots for society. While spoken language must be part of the solution, our ability to provide spoken language…
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…
Social robots are expected to be a human labor support technology, and one application of them is an advertising medium in public spaces. When social robots provide information, such as recommended shops, adaptive communication according to…