Related papers: An Information Theoretic Approach to Sample Acquis…
Research into several aspects of robot-enabled reconnaissance of random fields is reported. The work has two major components: the underlying theory of information acquisition in the exploration of unknown fields and the results of…
Classification and characterization of variable phenomena and transient phenomena are critical for astrophysics and cosmology. These objects are commonly studied using photometric time series or spectroscopic data. Given that many ongoing…
Interactive exploration of the unknown physical properties of objects such as stiffness, mass, center of mass, friction coefficient, and shape is crucial for autonomous robotic systems operating continuously in unstructured environments.…
Robots can be used to collect environmental data in regions that are difficult for humans to traverse. However, limitations remain in the size of region that a robot can directly observe per unit time. We introduce a method for selecting a…
This work presents a framework for automatically extracting physical object properties, such as material composition, mass, volume, and stiffness, through robot manipulation and a database of object measurements. The framework involves…
We are witnessing significant progress on perception models, specifically those trained on large-scale internet images. However, efficiently generalizing these perception models to unseen embodied tasks is insufficiently studied, which will…
Objects in the world usually appear in context, participating in spatial relationships and interactions that are predictable and expected. Knowledge of these contexts can be used in the task of using a mobile camera to search for a…
An unsupervised shape analysis is proposed to learn concepts reflecting shape commonalities. Our approach is two-fold: i) a spatial topology analysis of point cloud segment constellations within objects is used in which constellations are…
Perceiving accurate 3D object shape is important for robots to interact with the physical world. Current research along this direction has been primarily relying on visual observations. Vision, however useful, has inherent limitations due…
To autonomously navigate and plan interactions in real-world environments, robots require the ability to robustly perceive and map complex, unstructured surrounding scenes. Besides building an internal representation of the observed scene…
In this article, we propose a sampling-based motion planning algorithm equipped with an information-theoretic convergence criterion for incremental informative motion planning. The proposed approach allows dense map representations and…
Task-oriented grasping of unfamiliar objects is a necessary skill for robots in dynamic in-home environments. Inspired by the human capability to grasp such objects through intuition about their shape and structure, we present a novel…
Recent progress in robotic manipulation has dealt with the case of previously unknown objects in the context of relatively simple tasks, such as bin-picking. Existing methods for more constrained problems, however, such as deliberate…
Interestingness recognition is crucial for decision making in autonomous exploration for mobile robots. Previous methods proposed an unsupervised online learning approach that can adapt to environments and detect interesting scenes quickly,…
This paper addresses the problem of simultaneously exploring an unknown object to model its shape, using tactile sensors on robotic fingers, while also improving finger placement to optimise grasp stability. In many situations, a robot will…
Robots operating in an open world will encounter novel objects with unknown physical properties, such as mass, friction, or size. These robots will need to sense these properties through interaction prior to performing downstream tasks with…
In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for exploratory projection pursuit. The basis of the algorithm is the insight that previous approaches used fairly narrow definitions of interestingness / non interestingness. We argue that allowing…
Many robotic tasks involving some form of 3D visual perception greatly benefit from a complete knowledge of the working environment. However, robots often have to tackle unstructured environments and their onboard visual sensors can only…
Earth observing satellites are powerful tools for collecting scientific information about our planet, however they have limitations: they cannot easily deviate from their orbital trajectories, their sensors have a limited field of view, and…
The perception of an object's surface is important for robotic applications enabling robust object manipulation. The level of accuracy in such a representation affects the outcome of the action planning, especially during tasks that require…