20 accepted papers
Hand-drawn maps can be used to convey navigation instructions between humans and robots in a natural and efficient manner. However, these maps can often contain inaccuracies such as scale distortions and missing landmarks which present challenges for mobile robot navigation. This paper introduces a …
Existing navigation methods are primarily designed for specific robot embodiments, limiting their generalizability across diverse robot platforms. In this paper, we introduce X-Nav, a novel framework for end-to-end cross-embodiment navigation where a single unified policy can be deployed across vari…
Existing navigation methods are primarily designed for specific robot embodiments, limiting their generalizability across diverse robot platforms. In this paper, we introduce X-Nav, a novel framework for end-to-end cross-embodiment navigation where a single unified policy can be deployed across vari
Hand-drawn maps can be used to convey navigation instructions between humans and robots in a natural and efficient manner. However, these maps can often contain inaccuracies such as scale distortions and missing landmarks which present challenges for mobile robot navigation. This paper introduces a
Service robots in human-centered environments such as hospitals, office buildings, and long-term care homes need to navigate while adhering to social norms to ensure the safety and comfortability of the people they are sharing the space with. Furthermore, they need to adapt to new social scenarios t
In unknown cluttered and dynamic environments such as disaster scenes, mobile robots need to perform target-driven navigation in order to find people or objects of interest, where the only information provided about these targets are images of the individual targets. In this letter, we introduce Nav
Many older adults prefer to stay in their own homes and age-in-place. However, physical and cognitive limitations in independently completing activities of daily living (ADLs) requires older adults to receive assistive support, often necessitating transitioning to care centers. In this paper, we pre…
Cooperative multi-robot teams need to be able to explore cluttered and unstructured environments while dealing with communication dropouts that prevent them from exchanging local information to maintain team coordination. Therefore, robots need to consider high-level teammate intentions during actio
Robotic detection of people in crowded and/or cluttered human-centered environments including hospitals, stores and airports is challenging as people can become occluded by other people or objects, and deform due to clothing or pose variations. There can also be loss of discriminative visual feature
Adaptive learning is critical to helping robots personalize their interactions with people, particularly when considering skills needed by socially assistive robots, such as persuasion. In this letter, we propose a novel, hybrid hierarchical learning architecture for use in social human-robot intera
Robots that autonomously navigate real-world 3D cluttered environments need to safely traverse terrain with abrupt changes in surface normals and elevations. In this letter, we present the development of a novel sim-to-real pipeline for a mobile robot to effectively learn how to navigate real-world
As robots work in increasingly collaborative settings with humans, scenarios will arise where robots need to successfully request favors to be effective. Communication directness and familiarity have been shown to be important factors to persuasion. However, these two critical factors have not yet b
Numerous millirobots were developed in the past decade for autonomous swarm systems that aim to utilize large numbers of these units in space-constrained environments. However, the size limitation of these robots has often resulted in their reduced computational, sensing, and locomotion capabilities
Rescue robots can be used in urban search and rescue (USAR) applications to perform the important task of exploring unknown cluttered environments. Due to the unpredictable nature of these environments, deep learning techniques can be used to perform these tasks. In this letter, we present the first
This letter presents an exploratory social human- robot interaction (HRI) study that investigates and compares the persuasive effectiveness of robots attempting to influence a user with different behavior strategies. Ten multimodal persuasive strategies were uniquely designed based on compliance gai
For robots to become collaborative assistants, they need to be capable of naturally interacting with users in real environments. They also need to be able to learn new skills from non-expert users. In this letter, we present a novel parallel hidden Markov model (PaHMM) architecture for learning from
This paper discusses the time-phased deployment of wireless sensor networks, applied to surveillance areas growing in time. The focus herein is on the planning of the time-efficient delivery of static sensors to their designated nodes, given a network configuration. The novelty of the proposed strat…
Group-based recreational activities have shown to have a number of health benefits for people of all ages. The handful of social robots designed to facilitate such activities are currently only able to implement a priori known recreational activities that have been pre-programmed by human experts. O…
This paper was recommended for publication by Editor J. Li upon evaluation of the Associate Editor and Reviewers’ comments.
Millirobots have increasingly become popular over the past several years, especially for swarm-behavior studies, allowing researchers to run experiments with a large number of units in limited workspaces. However, as these robots have become smaller in size, their sensory capabilities and battery li…