Related papers: Multirobot Cliff Climbing on Low-Gravity Environme…
This paper proposes a cooperative environmental learning algorithm working in a fully distributed manner. A multi-robot system is more effective for exploration tasks than a single robot, but it involves the following challenges: 1) online…
Multi-robot assembly systems are becoming increasingly appealing in manufacturing due to their ability to automatically, flexibly, and quickly construct desired structural designs. However, effectively planning for these systems in a manner…
Wheeled ground robots are limited from exploring extreme environments such as caves, lava tubes and skylights. Small robots that utilize unconventional mobility through hopping, flying and rolling can overcome many roughness limitations and…
To achieve autonomy in complex real-world exploration missions, we consider deployment strategies for a team of robots with heterogeneous autonomy capabilities. In this work, we formulate a multi-robot exploration mission and compute an…
This paper studies the multi-robot reliable navigation problem in uncertain topological networks, which aims at maximizing the robot team's on-time arrival probabilities in the face of road network uncertainties. The uncertainty in these…
This work proposes an autonomous multi-robot exploration pipeline that coordinates the behaviors of robots in an indoor environment composed of multiple rooms. Contrary to simple frontier-based exploration approaches, we aim to enable…
Cooperative transportation via multiple aerial robots has the potential to support various payloads and reduce the chances of them being dropped. Furthermore, autonomously controlled robots render the system scalable with respect to the…
Conventional wheeled robots are unable to traverse scientifically interesting, but dangerous, cave environments. Multi-limbed climbing robot designs, such as ReachBot, are able to grasp irregular surface features and execute climbing…
Hexapod robots are potentially suitable for carrying out tasks in cluttered environments since they are stable, compact, and light weight. They also have multi-joint legs and variable height bodies that make them good candidates for tasks…
The exploration of large-scale unknown environments can benefit from the deployment of multiple robots for collaborative mapping. Each robot explores a section of the environment and communicates onboard pose estimates and maps to a central…
Navigating a large-scaled robot in unknown and cluttered height-constrained environments is challenging. Not only is a fast and reliable planning algorithm required to go around obstacles, the robot should also be able to change its…
Modern robotic systems are endowed with superior mobility and mechanical skills that make them suited to be employed in real-world scenarios, where interactions with heavy objects and precise manipulation capabilities are required. For…
Teams of mobile [aerial, ground, or aquatic] robots have applications in resource delivery, patrolling, information-gathering, agriculture, forest fire fighting, chemical plume source localization and mapping, and search-and-rescue. Robot…
Autonomous exploration in unknown environments remains a fundamental challenge in robotics, particularly for applications such as search and rescue, industrial inspection, and planetary exploration. Multi-robot active SLAM presents a…
Limbed climbing robots are designed to explore challenging vertical walls, such as the skylights of the Moon and Mars. In such robots, the primary role of a hand-eye camera is to accurately estimate 3D positions of graspable points (i.e.,…
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…
Flippers are essential components of tracked robot locomotion systems for unstructured terrain, especially within a rescue scenario. Achieving full and semi-autonomy for such rescue robots is the goal of many research efforts. In this work,…
As natural access points to the subsurface, lava tubes and other caves have become premier targets of planetary missions for astrobiological analyses. Few existing robotic paradigms, however, are able to explore such challenging…
Multi-robot systems are increasingly deployed in high-risk missions such as reconnaissance, disaster response, and subterranean operations. Protecting a human operator while navigating unknown and adversarial environments remains a critical…
Recently, there have been numerous advances in the development of biologically inspired lightweight Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). While autonomous navigation is fairly straight-forward for large UAVs as expensive sensors and monitoring…