Related papers: From Words to Safety: Language-Conditioned Safety …
Preference-aligned robot navigation in human environments is typically achieved through learning-based approaches, utilizing user feedback or demonstrations for personalization. However, personal preferences are subject to change and might…
The integration of electric vehicles (EVs) into smart grids presents unique opportunities to enhance both transportation systems and energy networks. However, ensuring safe and interpretable interactions between drivers, vehicles, and the…
Widespread adoption of self-driving cars will depend not only on their safety but largely on their ability to interact with human users. Just like human drivers, self-driving cars will be expected to understand and safely follow…
Robots operating in dynamic, unstructured environments must balance safety and efficiency under potentially limited sensing. While control barrier functions (CBFs) provide principled collision avoidance via safety filtering, their behavior…
Vision-language-action models (VLAs) show potential as generalist robot policies. However, these models pose extreme safety challenges during real-world deployment, including the risk of harm to the environment, the robot itself, and…
Prompting robots with natural language (NL) has largely been studied as what task to execute (goal selection, skill sequencing) rather than how to execute that task safely and efficiently in semantically rich, human-centric spaces. We…
Social robot navigation increasingly relies on large language models for reasoning, path planning, and enabling movement in dynamic human spaces. However, relying solely on LLMs for planning often leads to unpredictable and unsafe…
Recent advances in the development of robotic foundation models have led to promising end-to-end and general-purpose capabilities in robotic systems. Trained on vast datasets of simulated and real-world trajectories, these policies map…
As large language models (LLMs) become easily accessible nowadays, the trade-off between safety and helpfulness can significantly impact user experience. A model that prioritizes safety will cause users to feel less engaged and assisted…
Humans are known to construct cognitive maps of their everyday surroundings using a variety of perceptual inputs. As such, when a human is asked for directions to a particular location, their wayfinding capability in converting this…
Navigating human-filled spaces is crucial for the interactive social robots to support advanced services, such as cooperative carrying, which enables service provision in complex and crowded environments while adapting behavior based on…
Vision-language models (VLMs) have recently emerged as powerful representation learning systems that align visual observations with natural language concepts, offering new opportunities for semantic reasoning in safety-critical autonomous…
This paper presents a framework that can interpret humans' navigation commands containing temporal elements and directly translate their natural language instructions into robot motion planning. Central to our framework is utilizing Large…
Modern robotics applications that involve human-robot interaction require robots to be able to communicate with humans seamlessly and effectively. Natural language provides a flexible and efficient medium through which robots can exchange…
Navigating robots discreetly in human work environments while considering the possible privacy implications of robotic tasks presents significant challenges. Such scenarios are increasingly common, for instance, when robots transport…
The socially-aware navigation system has evolved to adeptly avoid various obstacles while performing multiple tasks, such as point-to-point navigation, human-following, and -guiding. However, a prominent gap persists: in Human-Robot…
A major challenge to deploying robots widely is navigation in human-populated environments, commonly referred to as social robot navigation. While the field of social navigation has advanced tremendously in recent years, the fair evaluation…
The overarching research direction of this work is the development of a ''Responsible Intelligence'' framework designed to reconcile the immense generative power of Large Language Models (LLMs) with the stringent requirements of real-world…
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…
Roadway safety and mobility remain critical challenges for modern transportation systems, demanding innovative analytical frameworks capable of addressing complex, dynamic, and heterogeneous environments. While traditional engineering…