Related papers: An Approach to Autonomous Science by Modeling Geol…
Model-based approaches bear great promise for decision making of agents interacting with the physical world. In the context of spatial environments, different types of problems such as localisation, mapping, navigation or autonomous…
In the future, extraterrestrial expeditions will not only be conducted by rovers but also by flying robots. The technical demonstration drone Ingenuity, that just landed on Mars, will mark the beginning of a new era of exploration…
In a context of autonomous robots, one of the most important task is to ensure the safety of the robot and its surrounding. Most of the time, the risk of navigation is simply said to be the probability of collision. This notion of risk is…
This thesis enhances the autonomy of the M4 (Multi-Modal Mobility Morphobot) robot, designed for Mars and rescue missions. The research enables the robot to autonomously select its locomotion mode and path in complex terrains. Focusing on…
Autonomous shipping has recently gained much interest in the research community. However, little research focuses on inland - and port navigation, even though this is identified by countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands as an…
Autonomous systems will play an essential role in many applications across diverse domains including space, marine, air, field, road, and service robotics. They will assist us in our daily routines and perform dangerous, dirty and dull…
Autonomous underwater robots are increasingly deployed for environmental monitoring, infrastructure inspection, subsea resource exploration, and long-horizon exploration. Yet, despite rapid advances in learning-based planning and control,…
Despite decades of efforts, robot navigation in a real scenario with volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA for short), remains a challenging topic. Inspired by the central nervous system (CNS), we propose a hierarchical…
The next generation of physical science involves robot scientists - autonomous physical science systems capable of experimental design, execution, and analysis in a closed loop. Such systems have shown real-world success for scientific…
Research on coastal regions traditionally involves methods like manual sampling, monitoring buoys, and remote sensing, but these methods face challenges in spatially and temporally diverse regions of interest. Autonomous surface vehicles…
Scientific research is being reshaped by AI systems that move beyond isolated assistance toward longer-horizon workflows spanning literature grounding, hypothesis generation, experimentation, validation, reporting, and revision. This shift…
Collaborative navigation of heterogeneous robots in unknown environments poses significant challenges due to sensing, communication, and computational limitations. In this work, a lead robot navigates toward a target while a mobile sensor…
The challenge of traversability estimation is a crucial aspect of autonomous navigation in unstructured outdoor environments such as forests. It involves determining whether certain areas are passable or risky for robots, taking into…
The capability of autonomous exploration in complex, unknown environments is important in many robotic applications. While recent research on autonomous exploration have achieved much progress, there are still limitations, e.g., existing…
To extend the limited scope of autonomy used in prior missions for operation in distant and complex environments, there is a need to further develop and mature autonomy that jointly reasons over multiple subsystems, which we term…
The technology for autonomous vehicles is close to replacing human drivers by artificial systems endowed with high-level decision-making capabilities. In this regard, systems must learn about the usual vehicle's behavior to predict imminent…
Autonomous exploration in unknown environments is key for mobile robots, helping them perceive, map, and make decisions in complex areas. However, current methods often rely on frequent global optimization, suffering from high computational…
Scientific discovery increasingly entails long-horizon exploration of complex hypothesis spaces, yet most existing approaches emphasize final performance while offering limited insight into how scientific exploration unfolds over time,…
Mobile robotics is a research area that has witnessed incredible advances for the last decades. Robot navigation is an essential task for mobile robots. Many methods are proposed for allowing robots to navigate within different…
Robots require a semantic understanding of their surroundings to operate in an efficient and explainable way in human environments. In the literature, there has been an extensive focus on object labeling and exhaustive scene graph…