Related papers: Robot Swarms in an Uncertain World: Controllable A…
When mobile robots maneuver near people, they run the risk of rudely blocking their paths; but not all people behave the same around robots. People that have not noticed the robot are the most difficult to predict. This paper investigates…
In the present paper we develop a distributed method to reconnect a multi-robot team after connectivity failures, caused by unpredictable environment changes, i.e. appearance of new obstacles. After the changes, the team is divided into…
Many manipulation tasks pose a challenge since they depend on non-visual environmental information that can only be determined after sustained physical interaction has already begun. This is particularly relevant for effort-sensitive,…
Soft robots manufactured with flexible materials can be highly compliant and adaptive to their surroundings, which facilitates their application in areas such as dexterous manipulation and environmental exploration. This paper aims at…
Shared autonomy integrates user input with robot autonomy in order to control a robot and help the user to complete a task. Our work aims to improve the performance of such a human-robot team: the robot tries to guide the human towards an…
We propose Conformal Lie-group Action Prediction Sets (CLAPS), a symmetry-aware conformal prediction-based algorithm that constructs, for a given action, a set guaranteed to contain the resulting system configuration at a user-defined…
Living beings are able to solve a wide variety of problems that they encounter rarely or only once. Without the benefit of extensive and repeated experience with these problems, they can solve them in an ad-hoc manner. We call this capacity…
Since humans and robots are increasingly sharing portions of their operational spaces, experimental evidence is needed to ascertain the safety and social acceptability of robots in human-populated environments. Although several studies have…
In this paper we consider the problem of controlling the dynamic behavior of a multi-robot system while interacting with the environment. In particular, we propose a general methodology that, by means of locally scaling inter-robot coupling…
To accomplish complex swarm robotic missions in the real world, one needs to plan and execute a combination of single robot behaviors, group primitives such as task allocation, path planning, and formation control, and mission-specific…
A number of coordinated behaviors have been proposed for achieving specific tasks for multi-robot systems. However, since most applications require more than one such behavior, one needs to be able to compose together sequences of behaviors…
Robotic manipulation behavior should be robust to disturbances that violate high-level task-structure. Such robustness can be achieved by constantly monitoring the environment to observe the discrete high-level state of the task. This is…
Robots operating alongside humans often encounter unfamiliar environments that make autonomous task completion challenging. Though improving models and increasing dataset size can enhance a robot's performance in unseen environments, data…
The biologically-inspired swarm paradigm is being used to design self-organizing systems of locally interacting artificial agents. A major difficulty in designing swarms with desired characteristics is understanding the causal relation…
Maintaining safety under adaptation has long been considered to be an important capability for autonomous systems. As these systems estimate and change the ego-model of the system dynamics, questions regarding how to develop safety…
Contemporary robots have become exceptionally skilled at achieving specific tasks in structured environments. However, they often fail when faced with the limitless permutations of real-world unstructured environments. This motivates…
Designing controllers for robot swarms is challenging, because human developers have typically no good understanding of the link between the details of a controller that governs individual robots and the swarm behavior that is an indirect…
Swarm robotics utilises decentralised self-organising systems to form complex collective behaviours built from the bottom-up using individuals that have limited capabilities. Previous work has shown that simple occlusion-based strategies…
To succeed in the real world, robots must cope with situations that differ from those seen during training. We study the problem of adapting on-the-fly to such novel scenarios during deployment, by drawing upon a diverse repertoire of…
Modern industrial applications require robots to be able to operate in unpredictable environments, and programs to be created with a minimal effort, as there may be frequent changes to the task. In this paper, we show that genetic…