There is a growing trend towards designing learning activities featuring robots as collaborative exercises where children work together to achieve the activity objectives, generating interactions that can trigger learning processes. Witnessing such activit ...
Gender inequality is a widespread problem in our society. It can manifest itself in many ways and contexts, and starting as early as primary school. While an increasing number of initiatives aim at tackling gender biases and inequalities, few of them are a ...
Model-based reinforcement learning for robot control offers the advantages of overcoming concerns on data collection and iterative processes for policy improvement in model-free methods. However, both methods use exploration strategy relying on heuristics ...
The thesis at hand is concerned with robots' navigation in human crowds. Specifically, methods are developed for planning a mobile robot's local motion between pedestrians, and they are evaluated in experiments where a robot interacts with real pedestrians ...
During reaching actions, the human central nerve system (CNS) generates the trajectories that optimize effort and time. When there is an obstacle in the path, we make sure that our arm passes the obstacle with a sufficient margin. This comfort margin varie ...
In this thesis, we address the complex issue of collision avoidance in the joint space of robots. Avoiding collisions with both the robot's own body parts and obstacles in the environment is a critical constraint in motion planning and is crucial for ensur ...
The use of aerial vehicles for exploration and data collection has the potential to significantly aid environmental monitoring in environments which are dangerous and hard to navigate. However, within these environments navigation can often be restricted b ...
As the field of ethology advances, especially over the past two decades, the role of animal-robot interaction tools has increasingly become essential. This importance arises from the need for controlled, repetitive, repeatable, and long-duration experiment ...
Soft robots aim to revolutionize how robotic systems interact with the environment thanks to their inherent compliance. Some of these systems are even able to modulate their physical softness. However, simply equipping a robot with softness will not genera ...
The digitization of timber construction, the emergence of engineered wood products, and the urgent need to drastically reduce buildings' environmental impact have given a rebirth to wood as a construction material. On the one hand, increasing the use of ti ...
