11 accepted papers
Navigating new indoor spaces and interacting with the environment presents many challenges for people who are blind or have low vision (BLV). To address these challenges, we prototyped a smartphone-based conversational assistant that helps BLV people navigate and interact with their environment. The
Social navigation and pedestrian behavior research has shifted towards machine learning-based methods and converged on the topic of modeling inter-pedestrian interactions and pedestrian-robot interactions. For this, large-scale datasets that contain rich information are needed. We describe a portabl…
In this work, we aim to improve transparency and efficacy in human-robot collaboration by developing machine teaching algorithms suitable for groups with varied learning capabilities. While previous approaches focused on tailored approaches for teaching individuals, our method teaches teams with var…
Typical black-box optimization approaches in robotics focus on learning from metric scores. However, that is not always possible, as not all developers have ground truth available. Learning appropriate robot behavior in human-centric contexts often requires querying users, who typically cannot provi…
We focus on the problem of planning the motion of a robot in a dynamic multiagent environment such as a pedestrian scene. Enabling the robot to navigate safely and in a socially compliant fashion in such scenes requires a representation that accounts for the unfolding multiagent dynamics. Existing a…
Human-in-the-loop Machine Learning (HIL-ML) is a widely adopted paradigm for instilling human knowledge in autonomous agents. Many design choices influence the efficiency and effectiveness of such interactive learning processes, particularly the interaction type through which the human teacher may p…
Mobile robots in crowds often have limited navigation capability due to insufficient evaluation of pedestrian behavior. We strengthen this capability by predicting splits and merges in multi-person groups. Successful predictions should lead to more efficient planning while also increasing human acce
Robots operating in human environments must be careful, when executing their manipulation skills, not to disturb nearby objects. This requires robots to reason about the effect of their manipulation choices by accounting for the support relationships among objects in the scene. Humans do this in par…
Many robot applications being explored involve robots leading humans during navigation. Developing effective robots for this task requires a way for robots to understand and model a human's following behavior. In this paper, we present results from a user study of how humans follow a guide robot in…
Dynamic changes can present significant challenges for visually impaired travelers to safely and independently navigate urban environments. To address these challenges, we are developing the NavPal suite of technology tools [1]. NavPal includes a dynamic guidance tool [2] in the form of a smartphone…
Appropriate robot behavior in public, open spaces cannot occur without the ability to automatically detect conversational groups of free-standing people. To this end, we propose an alternating optimization procedure that estimates lower body orientations and detects groups of interacting people. The…