Related papers: Robot Swarms in an Uncertain World: Controllable A…

Swarm robotic systems utilize collective behaviour to achieve goals that might be too complex for a lone entity, but become attainable with localized communication and collective decision making. In this paper, a behaviour-based distributed…

The complexity of a legged robot's environment or task can inform how specialised its gait must be to ensure success. Evolving specialised robotic gaits demands many evaluations - acceptable for computer simulations, but not for physical…

Microrobotics has the potential to revolutionize many applications including targeted material delivery, assembly, and surgery. The same properties that promise breakthrough solutions---small size and large populations---present unique…

We propose a decentralized control algorithm for a minimalistic robotic swarm with limited capabilities such that the desired global behavior emerges. We consider the problem of searching for and encapsulating various targets present in the…

Robust and flexible leader-following is a critical capability for robots to integrate into human society. While existing methods struggle to generalize to leaders of arbitrary form and often fail when the leader temporarily leaves the…

Multi-robot planning and coordination in uncertain environments is a fundamental computational challenge, since the belief space increases exponentially with the number of robots. In this paper, we address the problem of planning in…

In order to safely operate around humans, robots can employ predictive models of human motion. Unfortunately, these models cannot capture the full complexity of human behavior and necessarily introduce simplifying assumptions. As a result,…

Swarming systems, such as for example multi-drone networks, excel at cooperative tasks like monitoring, surveillance, or disaster assistance in critical environments, where autonomous agents make decentralized decisions in order to fulfill…

This paper introduces a novel bio-mimetic approach for distributed control of robotic swarms, inspired by the collective behaviors of swarms in nature such as schools of fish and flocks of birds. The agents are assumed to have limited…

This paper presents a framework to define a task with freedom and variability in its goal state. A robot could use this to observe the execution of a task and target a different goal from the observed one; a goal that is still compatible…

In practical applications, the unpredictable movement of obstacles and the imprecise state observation of robots introduce significant uncertainties for the swarm of robots, especially in cluster environments. However, existing methods are…

We present a real-time, data-driven algorithm to enhance the social-invisibility of robots within crowds. Our approach is based on prior psychological research, which reveals that people notice and--importantly--react negatively to groups…

Uncertainty of environments has long been a difficult characteristic to handle, when performing real-world robot tasks. This is because the uncertainty produces unexpected observations that cannot be covered by manual scripting. Learning…

In order to solve complex, long-horizon tasks, intelligent robots need to carry out high-level, abstract planning and reasoning in conjunction with motion planning. However, abstract models are typically lossy and plans or policies computed…

Balancing safety and efficiency when planning in crowded scenarios with uncertain dynamics is challenging where it is imperative to accomplish the robot's mission without incurring any safety violations. Typically, chance constraints are…

Precisely tracking uncertainties is crucial for robots to successfully and safely operate in unstructured and dynamic environments. We present a probabilistic framework to precisely keep track of uncertainties throughout the entire…

Swarm robotic systems are systems in which multiple robots having simple functionality perform tasks through their cooperation, and are advantageous in that they can exhibit non-trivial macroscopic functions such as adaptability, fault…

This paper proposes a robot action planning scheme that provides an efficient and probabilistically safe plan for a robot interacting with an unconcerned human -- someone who is either unaware of the robot's presence or unwilling to engage…

Nature is an inhabitant for enormous number of species. All the species do perform complex activities with simple and elegant rules for their survival. The property of emergence of collective behavior is remarkably supporting their…

Understanding how humans respond to uncertainty is critical for designing safe and effective physical human-robot interaction (pHRI), as physically working with robots introduces multiple sources of uncertainty, including trust, comfort,…