Related papers: Capturing an Omnidirectional Evader in Convex Envi…

Learning strategic robot behavior -- like that required in pursuit-evasion interactions -- under real-world constraints is extremely challenging. It requires exploiting the dynamics of the interaction, and planning through both physical…

Differential dynamic programming (DDP) is a widely used and powerful trajectory optimization technique, however, due to its internal structure, it is not exempt from local minima. In this paper, we present Differential Dynamic Programming…

We present a novel Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) based policy to compute dynamically feasible and spatially aware velocities for a robot navigating among mobile obstacles. Our approach combines the benefits of the Dynamic Window…

Real-world environments are inherently uncertain, and to operate safely in these environments robots must be able to plan around this uncertainty. In the context of motion planning, we desire systems that can maintain an acceptable level of…

The 'Cheating Robot' version of Cops and Robbers is played on a finite, simple, connected graph. The players move in the same time period. However, before moving, the robot observes to which vertices the cops are moving and it is fast…

We report in experiment and simulation the spontaneous formation of dynamically bound pairs of shape changing smarticle robots undergoing locally repulsive collisions. Borrowing terminology from Conway's simulated Game of Life, these…

This paper presents a novel method for reformulating non-differentiable collision avoidance constraints into smooth nonlinear constraints using strong duality of convex optimization. We focus on a controlled object whose goal is to avoid…

One of the pivotal challenges in a multi-robot system is how to give attention to accuracy and efficiency while ensuring safety. Prior arts cannot strictly guarantee collision-free for an arbitrarily large number of robots or the results…

Representation learning and unsupervised skill discovery can allow robots to acquire diverse and reusable behaviors without the need for task-specific rewards. In this work, we use unsupervised reinforcement learning to learn a latent…

Obstacle detection and tracking represent a critical component in robot autonomous navigation. In this paper, we propose ODTFormer, a Transformer-based model to address both obstacle detection and tracking problems. For the detection task,…

This paper studies a pursuit-evasion problem involving a single pursuer and a single evader, where we are interested in developing a pursuit strategy that doesn't require continuous, or even periodic, information about the position of the…

We consider a single kinematically controlled robot with a bounded control range. The robot travels in a two-dimensional region supporting an unknown unsteady scalar field. A single sensor provides the field value at the current location of…

This paper investigates a pursuit-evasion problem involving three agents: a pursuer, an evader, and a defender. Cooperative guidance laws are developed for the evader-defender team that guarantee interception of the pursuer by the defender…

Traversing 3-D complex environments has always been a significant challenge for legged locomotion. Existing methods typically rely on external sensors such as vision and lidar to preemptively react to obstacles by acquiring environmental…

In autonomous and mobile robotics, a principal challenge is resilient real-time environmental perception, particularly in situations characterized by unknown and dynamic elements, as exemplified in the context of autonomous drone racing.…

Imitation Learning from monocular video demonstrations provides a scalable approach for teaching complex skills to humanoid robots. However, translating human motion to humanoids requires overcoming significant morphological mismatches.…

In this paper, we present a game-theoretic feedback terminal guidance law for an autonomous, unpowered hypersonic pursuit vehicle that seeks to intercept an evading ground target whose motion is constrained in a one-dimensional space. We…

When is heterogeneity in the composition of an autonomous robotic team beneficial and when is it detrimental? We investigate and answer this question in the context of a minimally viable model that examines the role of heterogeneous speeds…

Collision-free navigation in cluttered environments with static and dynamic obstacles is essential for many multi-robot tasks. Dynamic obstacles may also be interactive, i.e., their behavior varies based on the behavior of other entities.…

We consider a variant of the target defense problem where a single defender is tasked to capture a sequence of incoming intruders. The intruders' objective is to breach the target boundary without being captured by the defender. As soon as…