Related papers: Introducing M: A Modular, Modifiable Social Robot

In this paper we introduce the core results of the project on software development for social robotics systems. The usability of maintenance and control features is crucial for many kinds of systems, but in the case of social robotics we…

Distributed sensing by cooperative drone swarms is crucial for several Smart City applications, such as traffic monitoring and disaster response. Using an indoor lab with inexpensive drones, a testbed supports complex and ambitious studies…

For decades, robotics researchers have pursued various tasks for multi-robot systems, from cooperative manipulation to search and rescue. These tasks are multi-robot extensions of classical robotic tasks and often optimized on dimensions…

With application in the robotics and automation, more and more it becomes necessary the development of applications based on methodologies that facilitate future modifications, updates and enhancements in the original projected system. This…

This paper introduces an underwater multi-robot platform, named Aucamp, characterized by cost-effective monocular-camera-based sensing, distributed protocol and robust orientation control for localization. We utilize the clarity feature to…

An important factor in developing control models for human-robot collaboration is how acceptable they are to their human partners. One such method for creating acceptable control models is to attempt to mimic human-like behaviour in robots…

A social robot acting as a 'mediator' can enhance interactions between humans, for example, in fields such as education and healthcare. A particularly promising area of research is the use of a social robot mediator in a multiparty setting,…

Modular Self-Reconfigurable Robot (MSRR) systems are a class of robots capable of forming higher-level robotic systems by altering the topological relationships between modules, offering enhanced adaptability and robustness in various…

Recognizing and understanding conversational groups, or F-formations, is a critical task for situated agents designed to interact with humans. F-formations contain complex structures and dynamics, yet are used intuitively by people in…

Social Robotics poses tough challenges to software designers who are required to take care of difficult architectural drivers like acceptability, trust of robots as well as to guarantee that robots establish a personalised interaction with…

We present a framework for intuitive robot programming by non-experts, leveraging natural language prompts and contextual information from the Robot Operating System (ROS). Our system integrates large language models (LLMs), enabling…

Recent advances in large-scale machine learning have produced high-capacity foundation models capable of adapting to a broad array of downstream tasks. While such models hold great promise for robotics, the prevailing paradigm still…

Pogobots are a new type of open-source/open-hardware robots specifically designed for swarm robotics research. Their cost-effective and modular design, complemented by vibration-based and wheel-based locomotion, fast infrared communication…

Social robots have been used to assist with mental well-being in various ways such as to help children with autism improve on their social skills and executive functioning such as joint attention and bodily awareness. They are also used to…

We tackle the problem of learning complex, general behaviors directly in the real world. We propose an approach for robots to efficiently learn manipulation skills using only a handful of real-world interaction trajectories from many…

Safe and efficient co-planning of multiple robots in pedestrian participation environments is promising for applications. In this work, a novel multi-robot social-aware efficient cooperative planner that on the basis of off-policy…

Interacting with humans is one of the main challenges for mobile robots in a human inhabited environment. To enable adaptive behavior, a robot needs to recognize touch gestures and/or the proximity to interacting individuals. Moreover, a…

In this paper, we present an approach for robot learning of social affordance from human activity videos. We consider the problem in the context of human-robot interaction: Our approach learns structural representations of human-human (and…

There have been incredible advancements in robotics and spoken dialogue systems (SDSs) over the past few years, yet we still don't find social robots in public spaces like train stations, shopping malls, or hospital waiting rooms. In this…

Homogeneity and heterogeneity represent a well-known trade-off in the design of modular robot systems. This work addresses the heterogeneity concept, its rationales, design choices and performance evaluation. We introduce challenges for…