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 ...
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 ...
Programming intelligent robots requires robust controllers that can achieve desired tasks while adapting to the changes in the task and the environment. In this thesis, we address the challenges in designing such adaptive and anticipatory feedback controll ...
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 ...
In construction robotics, a conventional design-to-fabrication work-flow starts with designing a structure, followed by task and robotic motion planning, and ultimately, fabrication. However, this approach can prove unsuccessful, as we may only discover th ...
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 ...
Fully exploiting soft robots' capabilities requires devising strategies that can accurately control their movements with the limited amount of control sources available. This task is challenging for reasons including the hard-to-model dynamics, the system' ...
Haptic perception of softness is a unique feature of the human skin that relies on the concurrent measurements of the lateral deformation and compression of the skin during object manipulation. This is challenging to implement in robotics because of combin ...