Benjamin Morrell
This paper presents an appendix to the original NeBula autonomy solution developed by the TEAM CoSTAR (Collaborative SubTerranean Autonomous Robots), participating in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge. Specifically, this paper presents…
This paper reports on the state of the art in underground SLAM by discussing different SLAM strategies and results across six teams that participated in the three-year-long SubT competition. In particular, the paper has four main goals.…
Due to their resilience to motion blur and high robustness in low-light and high dynamic range conditions, event cameras are poised to become enabling sensors for vision-based exploration on future Mars helicopter missions. However,…
Search and rescue with a team of heterogeneous mobile robots in unknown and large-scale underground environments requires high-precision localization and mapping. This crucial requirement is faced with many challenges in complex and…
Multi-robot SLAM systems in GPS-denied environments require loop closures to maintain a drift-free centralized map. With an increasing number of robots and size of the environment, checking and computing the transformation for all the loop…
Lidar odometry has attracted considerable attention as a robust localization method for autonomous robots operating in complex GNSS-denied environments. However, achieving reliable and efficient performance on heterogeneous platforms in…
This paper presents and discusses algorithms, hardware, and software architecture developed by the TEAM CoSTAR (Collaborative SubTerranean Autonomous Robots), competing in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge. Specifically, it presents the…
In recent years, unsupervised deep learning approaches have received significant attention to estimate the depth and visual odometry (VO) from unlabelled monocular image sequences. However, their performance is limited in challenging…
Robots and particularly drones are especially useful in exploring extreme environments that pose hazards to humans. To ensure safe operations in these situations, usually perceptually degraded and without good GNSS, it is critical to have a…
In this report for the Nasa NIAC Phase I study, we present a mission architecture and a robotic platform, the Shapeshifter, that allow multi-domain and redundant mobility on Saturn's moon Titan, and potentially other bodies with…
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) in large-scale, unknown, and complex subterranean environments is a challenging problem. Sensors must operate in off-nominal conditions; uneven and slippery terrains make wheel odometry…