StretchBot: A Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Adaptive Guidance with Assistive Robots

Assistive robotics is an important subarea of robotics that focuses on the well-being of people with disabilities. A robotic guide dog is an assistive quadruped robot that helps visually impaired people in obstacle avoidance and navigation. Enabling language capabilities for robotic guide dogs goes beyond naively adding an existing dialog system onto a mobile robot. The novel challenges include grounding language in the dynamically changing environment and improving spatial awareness for the human handler. To address those challenges, we develop a novel dialog system for robotic guide dogs that uses LLMs to verbalize both navigational plans and scenes. The goal is to enable verbal communication for collaborative decision-making within the handler-robot team. In experiments, we conducted a human study to evaluate different verbalization strategies and a simulation study to assess the efficiency and accuracy in navigation tasks.

Physical caregiving robots need to assist different users with different tasks in diverse environments, and they come in many embodiments. While substantial progress has been made on individual caregiving tasks, most existing systems remain tightly coupled to specific environments and robot embodiments, and often do not explicitly model or constrain interactions around people, despite humans being special agents in the environment. This motivates a focus on adapting to context that emerges from the joint interaction between the environment and the robot's embodiment. We propose $E^2$-CARE, a framework that enables context-aware adaptation by representing primitive caregiving skills as interaction templates whose execution is reshaped online. $E^2$-CARE represents the environment, the robot, and the human within a unified 3D dynamic scene graph that models these interaction contexts explicitly, and synthesizes task-specific constraints to govern how each skill is executed. By enforcing these constraints at runtime, the same skill templates can be reused zero-shot and safely across diverse environments and robot embodiments. We evaluate $E^2$-CARE across four activities of daily living in hundreds of simulated household environments, including assistive home settings, and across diverse robot embodiments, and validate it through user studies on two caregiving tasks with two robots in various real-world environments. Results demonstrate consistent and successful adaptation across these environments and embodiments. Website: https://emprise.cs.cornell.edu/e2care

Consider one robot guide dog escorting a blind user to a seat while a second retrieves and delivers an object. We introduce GuideFetch, a framework for coordinating this concurrent guide-and-fetch mission with heterogeneous robots. A large language model (LLM) instantiates a schedule-conditioned four-action schema; deterministic normalization and validation enforce registered targets, robot capabilities, and the selected schedule, while robot and object states govern execution and completion. We record 360 simulator runs over 90 scene--seed combinations under scripted and online plan-provenance conditions. All 180 online responses validate on the first request and match their scripted references, so the plan-provenance comparison tests normalized-plan agreement rather than a distinct execution factor. A simulator-free mutation test accepts two valid controls and rejects all 32 rule-violating variants. Across 90 scene--seed cases per schedule, sequential and parallel execution achieve $72/90$ and $71/90$ operational successes. Among 56 common successes, the implemented role-reassigned parallel protocol reduces mean makespan by 41.3%. This system-level gain combines role assignment, action overlap, and scene geometry; state checks distinguish plan validity from verified mission completion.