Robotics: Single and Multi-Robot Motion Planning, Social Robotics

Overview

Recent technological advances anticipate humans soon share spaces with mobile autonomous robots in public places, sidewalks, and houses. Mobile robots are being used more recently for assistive technologies, early mental health detection, surveillance, distribution, and transportation applications. Such robot systems should, therefore, maneuver through pedestrian traffic without obstruction and adapt dynamically–and appropriately–to other pedestrians. Their navigation must be socially acceptable, and the robot can understand the user–s emotions and behavior to be able to help the user better. These social interactions limit the expanding role of robots and undermine the social acceptance of these machines. However, understanding the behaviors of pedestrians is a challenging problem for a robot. Our lab has done extensive research on using non-verbal cues such as facial expressions, trajectories, and other features for robots to better learn human behavior and adapt to it!

Areas

• Human-crowd Interaction
• Motion and Path Planning
• Social Robotics

Click on the research sub-areas to see the specific research publications.