In this paper, we propose and evaluate a novel human-machine interface (HMI) for controlling a standing mobility vehicle or person carrier robot, aiming for a hands-free control through upper-body natural postures derived from gaze tracking while walking. We target users with lower-body impairment with remaining upper-body motion capabilities. The developed HMI bases on a sensing array for capturing body postures; an intent recognition algorithm for continuous mapping of body motions to robot control space; and a personalizing system for multiple body sizes and shapes. We performed two user studies: first, an analysis of the required body muscles involved in navigating with the proposed control; and second, an assessment of the HMI compared with a standard joystick through quantitative and qualitative metrics in a narrow circuit task. We concluded that the main user control contribution comes from Rectus Abdominis and Erector Spinae muscle groups at different levels. Finally, the comparative study showed that a joystick still outperforms the proposed HMI in usability perceptions and controllability metrics, however, the smoothness of user control was similar in jerk and fluency. Moreover, users' perceptions showed that hands-free control made it more anthropomorphic, animated, and even safer.
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）；Università degli studi di Genova（热那亚大学）
In recent years, the numbers of life-size humanoids as well as their mobile capabilities have steadily grown. Stable walking motion and control for humanoid robots are active fields of research. In this scenario an open question is how to model and analyse the scene so that a motion planning algorithm can generate an appropriate walking pattern. This paper presents the current work towards scene modelling and understanding, using an RGBD sensor. The main objective is to provide the humanoid robot iCub with capabilities to navigate safely and interact with various parts of the environment. In t…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Only a small percentage of blind and low-vision people use traditional mobility aids such as a cane or a guide dog. Various assistive technologies have been proposed to address the limitations of traditional mobility aids. These devices often give either the user or the device majority of the control. In this work, we explore how varying levels of control affect the users' sense of agency, trust in the device, confidence, and successful navigation. We present Glide, a novel mobility aid with two modes for control: Glide-directed and User-directed. We employ Glide in a study (N=9) in which blin…
King Fahad University of Petroleum & Minerals（法赫德国王石油与矿产大学）
This paper suggests an integrated navigation system for an unmanned ground vehicle operating in an unknown cluttered environment. The navigator supports time-critical mobility making it possible for a mobile robot to reach a target from the first attempt without the need for a dedicated exploration and mapping stage. The robot only uses necessary and sufficient egocentric local sensory data collected on its way to the target. The construction of the navigation structure revolves around key properties of the harmonic potential field approach to motion planning. The robots trajectory is well-beh…
University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Technion – Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）
Exploring and navigating in extreme environments, such as caves, oceans, and planetary bodies, are often too hazardous for humans, and as such, robots are possible surrogates. These robots are met with significant locomotion challenges that require traversing a wide range of surface roughnesses and topologies. Previous locomotion strategies, involving wheels or ambulatory motion, such as snake platforms, have success on specific surfaces but fail in others which could be detrimental in exploration and navigation missions. In this paper, we present a novel approach that combines snake-like robo…
City-Wide Low-Altitude Urban Air Mobility: A Scalable Global Path Planning Approach via Risk-Aware Multi-Scale Cell Decomposition
School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学机械与航空航天工程学院）；School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Purdue University（普渡大学航空航天学院）
MRS-CWC: A Weakly Constrained Multi-Robot System with Controllable Constraint Stiffness for Mobility and Navigation in Unknown 3D Rough Environments
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；University of Hyogo（兵库县立大学）；Osaka University（大阪大学）；Tokyo College, Institute for Advanced Studies, The University of Tokyo（东京大学东京高等研究院）
Consider an assistive system that guides visually impaired users through speech and haptic feedback to their destination. Existing robotic and ubiquitous navigation technologies (e.g., portable, ground, or wearable systems) often operate in a generic, user-agnostic manner. However, to minimize confusion and navigation errors, our real-world analysis reveals a crucial need to adapt the instructional guidance across different end-users with diverse mobility skills. To address this practical issue in scalable system design, we propose a novel model-based reinforcement learning framework for perso…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Huzhou Institute, Zhejiang University（浙江大学湖州研究院）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
Terrestrial-aerial bimodal vehicles bloom in both academia and industry because they incorporate both the high mobility of aerial vehicles and the long endurance of ground vehicles. In this work, we present an autonomous and adaptive navigation framework to bring complete autonomy to this class of vehicles. The framework mainly includes 1) a hierarchical motion planner that generates safe and low-power terrestrial-aerial trajectories in unknown environments and 2) a unified motion controller which dynamically adjusts energy consumption in terrestrial locomotion. Extensive real-world experiment…
Safe mobility support system using crowd mapping and avoidance route planning using VLM
Graduate School of Regional Development and Creativity, Division of Engineering and Agriculture, Graduate School, Utsunomiya University（乌市大学研究生院区域发展与创意学院，工程与农业系）
CoNav Chair: Design of a ROS-based Smart Wheelchair for Shared Control Navigation in the Built Environment
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, University of Michigan（密歇根大学文学、科学与艺术学院）；University of Michigan Health（密歇根大学医疗系统）
Large efforts have focused on ensuring that the controllers for mobile service robots follow proxemics and other social rules to ensure both safe and socially acceptable distance to pedestrians. Nonetheless, involuntary contact may be unavoidable when the robot travels in crowded areas or when encountering adversarial pedestrians. Freezing the robot in response to contact might be detrimental to bystanders' safety and prevents it from achieving its task. Unavoidable contacts must hence be controlled to ensure the safe and smooth travelling of robots in pedestrian alleys. We present a force-lim…
This paper shows the achievement of a sensing and navigation system of aerial robot for measuring location and size of trees in a forest environment autonomously. Although forestry is an important industry in Japan, the working population of forestry is decreasing. Then, as an application of mechanization of forestry, we propose tree data collection system by aerial robots which have high mobility in three-dimensional space. First, we develop tree recognition and measurement method, along with algorithm to generate tree database. Second, we describe aerial robot navigation system based on tree…
Tactile-Based Human Intent Recognition for Robot Assistive Navigation
Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校电气与计算机工程系）；Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校Siebel计算与数据科学学院）
The Cassie bipedal robot designed by Agility Robotics is providing academics a common platform for sharing and comparing algorithms for locomotion, perception, and navigation. This paper focuses on feedback control for standing and walking using the methods of virtual constraints and gait libraries. The designed controller was implemented six weeks after the robot arrived at the University of Michigan and allowed it to stand in place as well as walk over sidewalks, grass, snow, sand, and burning brush. The controller for standing also enables the robot to ride a Segway. A model of the Cassie r…
Learning Robust Autonomous Navigation and Locomotion for Wheeled-Legged Robots
Robotic Systems Lab, ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院机器人系统实验室）；Neuromeka；Swiss-Mile Robotics AG（Swiss-Mile机器人公司）；The work was carried out during their stay at（该工作是在他们停留期间完成的）
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；AIOZ Ltd.（AIOZ有限公司）
Autonomous navigation is a long-standing field of robotics research, which provides an essential capability for mobile robots to execute a series of tasks on the same environments performed by human everyday. In this chapter, we present a set of algorithms to train and deploy deep networks for autonomous navigation of mobile robots using the Robot Operation System (ROS). We describe three main steps to tackle this problem: i) collecting data in simulation environments using ROS and Gazebo; ii) designing deep network for autonomous navigation, and iii) deploying the learned policy on mobile rob…
Baidu Research（百度研究院）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Metoak Technology (Beijing) CO., LTD.（北京梅托克科技有限公司）；Fuzhou University（福州大学）；University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）
We aim to enable a mobile robot to navigate through environments with dense crowds, e.g., shopping malls, canteens, train stations, or airport terminals. In these challenging environments, existing approaches suffer from two common problems: the robot may get frozen and cannot make any progress toward its goal, or it may get lost due to severe occlusions inside a crowd. Here we propose a navigation framework that handles the robot freezing and the navigation lost problems simultaneously. First, we enhance the robot's mobility and unfreeze the robot in the crowd using a reinforcement learning b…
Gaits engineered for snake-like robots to rotate in-place instrumentally fill a gap in the set of locomotive gaits that have traditionally prioritized translation. This paper designs a Turn-in-Place gait and demonstrates the ability of a shape-centric modeling framework to capture the gait's locomotive properties. Shape modeling for turning involves a time-varying continuous body curve described by a standing wave. Presumed viscous robot-ground frictional interactions lead to body dynamics conditioned on the time-varying shape model. The dynamic equations describing the Turn-in-Place gait are …
Swiss Federal School of Technology in Lausanne - EPFL（洛桑联邦理工学院）；University of Tsukuba（筑波大学）；Swiss Federal School of Technology in Zurich - ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
Autonomous navigation in highly populated areas remains a challenging task for robots because of the difficulty in guaranteeing safe interactions with pedestrians in unstructured situations. In this work, we present a crowd navigation control framework that delivers continuous obstacle avoidance and post-contact control evaluated on an autonomous personal mobility vehicle. We propose evaluation metrics for accounting efficiency, controller response and crowd interactions in natural crowds. We report the results of over 110 trials in different crowd types: sparse, flows, and mixed traffic, with…
CoNav Chair: Development and Evaluation of a Shared Control based Wheelchair for the Built Environment
Department of Civil Engineering, University of Michigan（密歇根大学土木工程系）；College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, University of Michigan（密歇根大学文理学院）；Wheelchair Seating Service, University of Michigan Health（密歇根大学健康学院轮椅适配服务）；Department of Rehabilitation Science and Technology, University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学康复科学与技术系）
VisioPath: Vision-Language Enhanced Model Predictive Control for Safe Autonomous Navigation in Mixed Traffic
System Engineering Program, Cornell University（Cornell大学系统工程项目）；School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Cornell University（Cornell大学土木与环境工程学院）；School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell University（Cornell大学电气与计算机工程学院）
University of Tsukuba Hospital（筑波大学附属医院）；University of Tsukuba（筑波大学）；Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）
We present a personal mobility device for lower-body impaired users through a light-weighted exoskeleton on wheels. On its core, a novel passive exoskeleton provides postural transition leveraging natural body postures with support to the trunk on sit-to-stand and stand-to-sit (STS) transitions by a single gas spring as an energy storage unit. We propose a direction-dependent coupling of knees and hip joints through a double-pulley wire system, transferring energy from the torso motion towards balancing the moment load at the knee joint actuator. Herewith, the exoskeleton maximizes energy tran…
UrbanV2X: A Multisensory Vehicle-Infrastructure Dataset for Cooperative Navigation in Urban Areas
Department of Aeronautical and Aviation Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（航空与航空工程系，香港理工大学）；Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute (ASTRI)（香港应用科学和技术研究院）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
