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Location-aware applications play an increasingly critical role in everyday life. However, satellite-based localization (e.g., GPS) has limited accuracy and can be unusable in dense urban areas and indoors. We introduce an image-based global…
3D human segmentation has seen noticeable progress in re-cent years. It, however, still remains a challenge to date. In this paper, weintroduce a deep patch-based method for 3D human segmentation. Wefirst extract a local surface patch for…
Estimating collision probabilities between robots and environmental obstacles or other moving agents is crucial to ensure safety during path planning. This is an important building block of modern planning algorithms in many application…
Biped robots usually adopt feet with a rigid structure that simplifies walking on flat grounds and yet hinders ground adaptation in unstructured environments, thus jeopardizing stability. We recently explored in the SoftFoot the idea of…
Probabilistic collision detection (PCD) is essential in motion planning for robots operating in unstructured environments, where considering sensing uncertainty helps prevent damage. Existing PCD methods mainly used simplified geometric…
Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…
Robots need both visual and contact sensing to effectively estimate the state of their environment. Camera RGBD data provides rich information of the objects surrounding the robot, and shape priors can help correct noise and fill in gaps…
The sense of touch plays a key role in enabling humans to understand and interact with surrounding environments. For robots, tactile sensing is also irreplaceable. While interacting with objects, tactile sensing provides useful information…
Wheeled robot navigation has been widely used in urban environments, but little research has been conducted on its navigation in wild vegetation. External sensors (LiDAR, camera etc.) are often used to construct point cloud map of the…
Autonomous navigation of ground robots has been widely used in indoor structured 2D environments, but there are still many challenges in outdoor 3D unstructured environments, especially in rough, uneven terrains. This paper proposed a…
In vegetated environments, such as forests, exploratory robots play a vital role in navigating complex, cluttered environments where human access is limited and traditional equipment struggles. Visual occlusion from obstacles, such as…
Many LiDAR place recognition systems have been developed and tested specifically for urban driving scenarios. Their performance in natural environments such as forests and woodlands have been studied less closely. In this paper, we analyzed…
In this paper, we study the task of 3D human pose estimation in the wild. This task is challenging due to lack of training data, as existing datasets are either in the wild images with 2D pose or in the lab images with 3D pose. We propose a…
Most legged robots are built with leg structures from serially mounted links and actuators and are controlled through complex controllers and sensor feedback. In comparison, animals developed multi-segment legs, mechanical coupling between…
Tactile perception is an essential ability of intelligent robots in interaction with their surrounding environments. This perception as an intermediate level acts between sensation and action and has to be defined properly to generate…
In the realm of autonomous mobile robots, safe navigation through unpaved outdoor environments remains a challenging task. Due to the high-dimensional nature of sensor data, extracting relevant information becomes a complex problem, which…
Some of the most challenging environments on our planet are accessible to quadrupedal animals but remain out of reach for autonomous machines. Legged locomotion can dramatically expand the operational domains of robotics. However,…
Many animals, modern aircraft, and underwater vehicles use streamlined body shapes that reduce fluid dynamic drag to achieve fast and effective locomotion in air and water. Similarly, numerous small terrestrial animals move through…
This paper addresses the localization of contacts of an unknown grasped rigid object with its environment, i.e., extrinsic to the robot. We explore the key role that distributed tactile sensing plays in localizing contacts external to the…
Task space trajectory tracking for quadruped robots plays a crucial role on achieving dexterous maneuvers in unstructured environments. To fulfill the control objective, the robot should apply forces through the contact of the legs with the…