14 accepted papers
Large behavior models (LBMs) have shown strong dexterous manipulation capabilities by extending imitation learning to large-scale training on extensive multi-task robot data, yet their generalization remains limited by the insufficient coverage of available robot data. To expand this coverage withou…
Recent advances in quadrupedal locomotion have focused on improving stability and performance across diverse environments. However, existing methods often lack adequate safety analysis and struggle to adapt to varying payloads and complex terrains, typically requiring extensive tuning. To overcome t…
Robots fail, potentially leading to a loss in the robot’s perceived reliability (PR), a measure correlated with trustworthiness. In this study we examine how various kinds of failures affect the PR of the robot differently, and how this measure recovers without explicit social repair actions by the …
Robots operating in unstructured environments must satisfy dynamic constraints that can change across tasks and even within a single execution. While diffusion policies can learn multimodal behaviors from demonstrations, adapting a trained policy at runtime to newly encountered or evolving constrain…
Whole-arm manipulation involves direct contact with the environment while the robot completes a task by distributing contact across multiple links as contacts form, slide, and break. This setting breaks common implicit assumptions in many learning-based manipulation pipelines: arm configuration tigh…
Recent advances in quadrupedal locomotion have focused on improving stability and performance across diverse environments. However, existing methods often lack adequate safety analysis and struggle to adapt to varying payloads and complex terrains, typically requiring extensive tuning. To overcome t
Traditional approaches to motion modeling for skid-steer robots struggle to capture nonlinear tire-terrain dynamics, especially during high-speed maneuvers. In this paper, we tackle such nonlinearities by enhancing a dynamic unicycle model with Gaussian Process (GP) regression outputs. This enables
Skid-Steer Wheeled Mobile Robots (SSWMRs) are increasingly being used for off-road autonomy applications. When turning at high speeds, these robots tend to undergo significant skidding and slipping. In this work, using Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) and Sigma-Point Transforms, we estimate the non…
Conventional bidirectional conveyance platforms use a flat translating belt or a series of spinning wheels or rollers to apply a shear force to payloads to move them. Wheel/roller-based conveyors in particular cannot double as a worktop when idle, do not support collision-free multi-object manipulat…
Shared control can ease and enhance a human operator’s ability to teleoperate robots, particularly for intricate tasks demanding fine control over multiple degrees of freedom. However, the arbitration process dictating how much autonomous assistance to administer in shared control can confuse novice…
Equipping robots with the ability to infer human intent is a vital precondition for effective collaboration. Most computational approaches towards this objective derive a probability distribution of “intent” conditioned on the robot's perceived state. However, these approaches typically assume task-…
Robots supplied with the ability to infer human intent have many applications in assistive robotics. In these applications, robots rely on accurate models of human intent to administer appropriate assistance. However, the effectiveness of this assistance also heavily depends on whether the human can…
Shared control plays a pivotal role in establishing effective human-robot interactions. Traditional control-sharing methods strive to complement a human's capabilities at safely completing a task, and thereby rely on users forming a mental model of the expected robot behaviour. However, these method…
Robotic wheelchairs with built-in assistive features, such as shared control, are an emerging means of providing independent mobility to severely disabled individuals. However, patients often struggle to build a mental model of their wheelchair's behaviour under different environmental conditions. M…