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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Shape-changing robots adapt their own morphology to address a wider range of functions or environments than is possible with a fixed or rigid structure. Akin to biological organisms, the ability to alter shape or configuration emerges from the underlying m ...
We address multi-robot safe mission planning in uncertain dynamic environments. This problem arises in several applications including safety-critical exploration, surveillance, and emergency rescue missions. Computation of a multi-robot optimal control pol ...
A vehicle's steering is a particular system in that it is exposed to individual subjective reviews based on criteria that are hard to assess quantitatively. Haptic design of such systems is a prime concern that has been at the center of industrial developm ...
Daily manipulation tasks are characterized by regular features associated with the task structure, which can be described by multiple geometric primitives related to actions and object shapes. Only using Cartesian coordinate systems cannot fully represent ...
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 ...
