Related papers: Navigation beyond Wayfinding: Robots Collaborating…
As AI systems become more prevalent, concerns about their development, operation, and societal impact intensify. Establishing ethical, social, and safety standards amidst evolving AI capabilities poses significant challenges. Global…
Indoor built environments like homes and offices often present complex and cluttered layouts that pose significant challenges for individuals who are blind or visually impaired, especially when performing tasks that involve locating and…
Learning visuomotor control policies in robotic systems is a fundamental problem when aiming for long-term behavioral autonomy. Recent supervised-learning-based vision and motion perception systems, however, are often separately built with…
Humans can robustly follow a visual trajectory defined by a sequence of images (i.e. a video) regardless of substantial changes in the environment or the presence of obstacles. We aim at endowing similar visual navigation capabilities to…
Globally, 340 million people have blindness or moderate to severe visual impairment (BVI)$^1$ which limits independent outdoor navigation$^2$ and negatively affects their health and quality of life$^{3,4}$. We surveyed 112 people with BVI…
Current orthopedic robotic systems largely focus on navigation, aiding surgeons in positioning a guiding tube but still requiring manual drilling and screw placement. The automation of this task not only demands high precision and safety…
Humans engaged in collaborative activities are naturally able to convey their intentions to teammates through multi-modal communication, which is made up of explicit and implicit cues. Similarly, a more natural form of human-robot…
Motivated by the vision of integrating mobile robots closer to humans in warehouses, hospitals, manufacturing plants, and the home, we focus on robot navigation in dynamic and spatially constrained environments. Ensuring human safety,…
This paper proposes a design for a hybrid, city-wide urban navigation system for moving agents demanding dedicated assistance. The hybrid system combines GPS and vehicle-to-vehicle communication from an ad-hoc network of parked cars, and…
With the advances in robotic technology, research in human-robot collaboration (HRC) has gained in importance. For robots to interact with humans autonomously they need active decision making that takes human partners into account. However,…
As robots increasingly enter human-centered environments, they must not only be able to navigate safely around humans, but also adhere to complex social norms. Humans often rely on non-verbal communication through gestures and facial…
Robotics has shown significant potential in assisting people with disabilities to enhance their independence and involvement in daily activities. Indeed, a societal long-term impact is expected in home-care assistance with the deployment of…
Navigation and motion control of a robot to a destination are tasks that have historically been performed with the assumption that contact with the environment is harmful. This makes sense for rigid-bodied robots where obstacle collisions…
The proliferation of robots in public spaces necessitates a deeper understanding of how these robots can interact with those they share the space with. In this paper, we present findings from video analysis of publicly deployed cleaning…
Model-based control is a popular paradigm for robot navigation because it can leverage a known dynamics model to efficiently plan robust robot trajectories. However, it is challenging to use model-based methods in settings where the…
Autonomous aerial robots are increasingly being deployed in real-world scenarios, where transparent glass obstacles present significant challenges to reliable navigation. Researchers have investigated the use of non-contact sensors and…
Visually impaired individuals rely heavily on accurate and timely information about obstacles and their surrounding environments to achieve independent living. In recent years, significant progress has been made in the development of…
Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) have drawn much attention to underwater tasks, such as the inspection and maintenance of infrastructure. The workload of ROV operators tends to be high, even for the skilled ones. Therefore, assistance…
This work introduces a robot navigation controller that combines event cameras and other sensors with reinforcement learning to enable real-time human-centered navigation and obstacle avoidance. Unlike conventional image-based controllers,…
Human navigation in built environments depends on symbolic spatial information which has unrealised potential to enhance robot navigation capabilities. Information sources such as labels, signs, maps, planners, spoken directions, and…