Related papers: Introducing M: A Modular, Modifiable Social Robot
There is a growing need for social robots and intelligent agents that can effectively interact with and support users. For the interactions to be seamless, the agents need to analyse social scenes and behavioural cues from their (robot's)…
The Robot Operating System (ROS) has significantly gained popularity among robotic engineers and researchers over the past five years, primarily due to its powerful infrastructure for node communication, which enables developers to build…
In the field of Geriatronics, enabling effective and transparent communication between humans and robots is crucial for enhancing the acceptance and performance of assistive robots. Our early-stage research project investigates the…
Tests and prototyping are vital in the research and development of robotic systems. Work with target hardware is problematic. Hence, in the article, a low-cost, miniaturised physical platform is presented to deal with experiments on…
The use of standard robotic platforms can accelerate research and lower the entry barrier for new research groups. There exist many affordable humanoid standard platforms in the lower size ranges of up to 60cm, but larger humanoid robots…
The field of robotics faces significant challenges related to the complexity and interoperability of existing middleware frameworks, like ROS2, which can be difficult for new developers to adopt. To address these issues, we propose…
Cross-platform robot control remains difficult because hardware interfaces, data formats, and control paradigms vary widely, which fragments toolchains and slows deployment. To address this, we present Control Your Robot, a modular,…
We present SocialGym 2, a multi-agent navigation simulator for social robot research. Our simulator models multiple autonomous agents, replicating real-world dynamics in complex environments, including doorways, hallways, intersections, and…
In this paper, we propose a minimum set of concepts and signals needed to track the social state during Human-Robot Interaction. We look into the problem of complex continuous interactions in a social context with multiple humans and…
Many have explored the application of continuum robot manipulators for minimally invasive surgery, and have successfully demonstrated the advantages their flexible design provides -- with some solutions having reached commercialisation and…
Soft robots have the potential to revolutionize the use of robotic systems with their capability of establishing safe, robust, and adaptable interactions with their environment, but their precise control remains challenging. In contrast,…
This paper presents our first attempt to integrate user modeling features in social and affective robots. We propose a cloud-based architecture for modeling the user-robot interaction in order to re-use the approach with different kind of…
World models are central to building agents that can reason, plan, and generalize beyond their training data. However, research on world models is currently fragmented, with disparate codebases, data pipelines, and evaluation protocols…
The field of social robotics will likely need to depart from a paradigm of designed behaviours and imitation learning and adopt modern reinforcement learning (RL) methods to enable robots to interact fluidly and efficaciously with humans.…
This paper describes the development of a humanoid robot called ARDOP. The goal of the project is to provide a modular, open-source, and inexpensive humanoid robot that would enable researchers to answer various problems related to robotic…
As human-robot collaboration is becoming more widespread, there is a need for a more natural way of communicating with the robot. This includes combining data from several modalities together with the context of the situation and background…
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…
We argue that hardware modularity plays a key role in the convergence of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI). We introduce a new approach for building robots that leads to more adaptable and capable machines. We present the concept of…
Safety concerns have risen as robots become more integrated into our daily lives and continue to interact closely with humans. One of the most crucial safety priorities is preventing collisions between robots and people walking nearby.…
The manual design of soft robots and their controllers is notoriously challenging, but it could be augmented---or, in some cases, entirely replaced---by automated design tools. Machine learning algorithms can automatically propose, test,…