Publication Details

Melanie Schmidt-Wolf, Tyler Becker, Denielle Oliva, David Feil-Seifer, and Monica Nicolescu. "Through the Clutter: Exploring the Impact of Complex Environments on the Legibility of Robot Motion." To Appear in 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2025), Atlanta, USA, May 2025.


  • Keywords:
  • HRI
  • socially assistive robotics
  • path-planning
  • safety

Abstract

The environments in which the collaboration of a robot would be the most helpful to a person are frequently uncontrolled and cluttered with many objects present. Legible robot arm motion is crucial in tasks like these in order to avoid possible collisions, improve the workflow and help ensure the safety of the person. Prior work in this area, however, focuses on solutions that are tested only in uncluttered environments and there are not many results taken from cluttered environments. In this research we present a measure for clutteredness based on an entropic measure of the environment, and a novel motion planner based on potential fields. Both our measures and the planner were tested in a cluttered environment meant to represent a more typical tool sorting task for which the person would collaborate with a robot. The in-person validation study with Baxter robots shows a significant improvement in legibility of our proposed legible motion planner compared to the current state-of-the-art legible motion planner in cluttered environments. Further, the results show a significant difference in the performance of the planners in cluttered and uncluttered environments, and the need to further explore legible motion in cluttered environments. We argue that the inconsistency of our results in cluttered environments with those obtained from uncluttered environments points out several important issues with the current research performed in the area of legible motion planners.

Author Details

Name: Melanie Schmidt-Wolf
email: mschmidtwolf@unr.edu
Status: Active

Name: Tyler Becker
email: tbecker@nevada.unr.edu
Status: Active

Name: Denielle Oliva
Status: Active

Name: David Feil-Seifer
email: dave@cse.unr.edu
Website: http://cse.unr.edu/~dave
Phone: (775) 784-6469
Status: Active

Name: Monica Nicolescu
Status: Active

BibTex Reference

@inproceedings{schmidt-wolf2025through,
  title={Through the Clutter: Exploring the Impact of Complex Environments on the Legibility of Robot Motion},
  author={Melanie Schmidt-Wolf and Tyler Becker and Denielle Oliva and David Feil-Seifer and Monica Nicolescu},
  year={2025},
  month={May},
  address={Atlanta, USA},
  booktitle={2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2025)},
}

HTML Reference

<span class="authors">Melanie Schmidt-Wolf, Tyler Becker, Denielle Oliva, David Feil-Seifer, and Monica Nicolescu</span>. <span class="title">"Through the Clutter: Exploring the Impact of Complex Environments on the Legibility of Robot Motion." </span> To Appear in <span class="booktitle">2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2025)</span>, <span class="address">Atlanta, USA</span>, <span class="month">May</span> <span class="year">2025</span>. <span class="ending"></span>

Support

AI Institute for Transforming Education for Children with Speech and Language Processing Challenges, National Science Foundation PI: Venugopal Govindaraju, co-PI: David Feil-Seifer, Amount: $20,000,000, Jan. 15, 2023 - Dec. 31, 2027