15 accepted papers
Robot guide dogs offer navigation assistance that will greatly expand the independent mobility of the visually impaired, but their effective use requires subtle human-robot coordination that is difficult for users to learn from generic verbal instructions. To tackle the challenge, we present CANINE,…
Navigating socially in human environments requires more than satisfying geometric constraints, as collision-free paths may still interfere with ongoing activities or conflict with social norms. Addressing this challenge calls for analyzing interactions between agents and incorporating common-sense r
With the increasing presence of service robots and autonomous vehicles in human environments, navigation systems need to evolve beyond simple destination reach to incorporate social awareness. This paper introduces GSON, a novel group-based social navigation framework that leverages Large Multimodal…
We consider an open-world planning setting in which service robots must operate in unknown environments with incomplete knowledge of objects and actions. Traditional closed-world approaches with pre-programmed knowledge bases fail when robots encounter unexpected situations and tasks, posing a funda…
Diffusion-based planners have shown strong performance in short-horizon tasks but often fail in complex, long-horizon settings. We trace the failure to loose coupling between high-level (HL) sub-goal selection and low-level (LL) trajectory generation, which leads to incoherent plans and degraded per…
With the increasing presence of service robots and autonomous vehicles in human environments, navigation systems need to evolve beyond simple destination reach to incorporate social awareness. This paper introduces <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/199
Imitating tool manipulation from human videos offers an intuitive approach to teaching robots, while also providing a promising and scalable alternative to labor-intensive teleoperation data collection for visuomotor policy learning. While humans can mimic tool manipulation behavior by observing oth…
Imagine a future when we can Zoom-call a robot to manage household chores remotely. This work takes one step in this direction. Robi Butler is a new household robot assistant that enables seamless multimodal remote interaction. It allows the human user to monitor its environment from a first-person
Operating home appliances, among the most common tools in every household, is a critical capability for assistive home robots. This paper presents ApBot, a robot system that operates novel household appliances by “reading” their user manuals. ApBot faces multiple challenges: (i) infer goal-condition…
Physical reasoning is important for effective robot manipulation. Recent work has investigated both vision and language modalities for physical reasoning; vision can reveal information about objects in the environment and language serves as an abstraction and communication medium for additional cont…
Cooperative object transportation using multiple robots has been intensively studied in the control and robotics literature, but most approaches are either only applicable to omnidirectional robots or lack a complete navigation and decision-making framework that operates in real time. This paper pre…
Guidance robots that can guide people and avoid various obstacles, could potentially be owned by more visually impaired people at a fairly low cost. Most of the previous guidance robots for the visually impaired ignored the human response behavior and comfort, treating the human as an appendage drag…
Autonomous navigation of ground robots has been widely used in indoor structured 2D environments, but there are still many challenges in outdoor 3D unstructured environments, especially in rough, uneven terrains. This paper proposed a plane-fitting based uneven terrain navigation framework (PUTN) to…
Autonomous mobile manipulation robots that can collect trolleys are widely used to liberate human resources and fight epidemics. Most prior robotic trolley collection solutions only detect trolleys with 2D poses or are merely based on spe-cific marks and lack the formal design of planning algorithms…
An autonomous robot that is able to physically guide humans through narrow and cluttered spaces could be a big boon to the visually-impaired. Most prior robotic guiding systems are based on wheeled platforms with large bases with actuated rigid guiding canes. The large bases and the actuated arms li…