Using Iran's unexpected flood in April 2019 as a natural experiment, we show that local branches bridge the time gap between the disaster and governmental aids by immediately increasing their lending for two months following the flood. Analyzing proprietar ...
Multimodal unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are rarely capable of more than two modalities, i.e., flying and walking or flying and perching. However, being able to fly, perch, and walk could further improve their usefulness by expanding their operating enve ...
Quadratic Programming (QP)-based controllers allow many robotic systems, such as humanoids, to successfully undertake complex motions and interactions. However, these approaches rely heavily on adequately capturing the underlying model of the environment a ...
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 ...
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 ...
Order, regularities, and patterns are ubiquitous around us. A flock of birds maneuvering in the sky, the self-organization of social insects, a global pandemic or a traffic jam are examples of complex systems where the macroscopic patterns arise from the m ...
One can estimate the velocity and acceleration of robot manipulators by utilizing nonlinear observers. This involves combining inertial measurement units (IMUs) with the motor encoders of the robot through a model-based sensor fusion technique. This approa ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
