Related papers: UAV and Service Robot Coordination for Indoor Obje…
Co-designing a robot's morphology and control can ensure synergistic interactions between them, prevalent in biological organisms. However, co-design is a high-dimensional search problem. To make this search tractable, we need a systematic…
Long-term monitoring of numerous dynamic targets can be tedious for a human operator and infeasible for a single robot, e.g., to monitor wild flocks, detect intruders, search and rescue. Fleets of autonomous robots can be effective by…
In this work, we evaluate the use of aerial drone hover constraints in a multisensor fusion of ground robot and drone data to improve the localization performance of a drone. In particular, we build upon our prior work on cooperative…
Proper path planning is the first step of robust and efficient autonomous navigation for mobile robots. Meanwhile, it is still challenging for robots to work in a complex environment without complete prior information. This paper presents…
This article presents Teledrive, a telepresence robotic system with embodied AI features that empowers an operator to navigate the telerobot in any unknown remote place with minimal human intervention. We conceive Teledrive in the context…
Existing navigation systems mostly consider "success" when the robot reaches within 1m radius to a goal. This precision is insufficient for emerging applications where the robot needs to be positioned precisely relative to an object for…
With the increase in demands for service robots and automated inspection, agents need to localize in its surrounding environment to achieve more natural communication with humans by shared contexts. In this work, we propose a novel but…
Human-robot collaboration, in which the robot intelligently assists the human with the upcoming task, is an appealing objective. To achieve this goal, the agent needs to be equipped with a fundamental collaborative navigation ability, where…
Regular irradiation of indoor environments with ultraviolet C (UVC) light has become a regular task for many indoor settings as a result of COVID-19, but current robotic systems attempting to automate it suffer from high costs and…
We present a multimodal interaction framework suitable for a human rescuer that operates in proximity with a set of co-located drones during search missions. This work is framed in the context of the SHERPA project whose goal is to develop…
Robots navigating in human environments should use language to ask for assistance and be able to understand human responses. To study this challenge, we introduce Cooperative Vision-and-Dialog Navigation, a dataset of over 2k embodied,…
Autonomously controlling the position of Remotely Operated underwater Vehicles (ROVs) is of crucial importance for a wide range of underwater engineering applications, such as in the inspection and maintenance of underwater industrial…
This paper addresses the problem of enabling a robot to search for a semantic object, i.e., an object with a semantic label, in an unknown and GPS-denied environment. For the robot in the unknown environment to detect and find the target…
Efficient exploration strategies are vital in tasks such as search-and-rescue missions and disaster surveying. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become particularly popular in such applications, promising to cover large areas at high…
Motion capture has become increasingly important, not only in computer animation but also in emerging fields like the virtual reality, bioinformatics, and humanoid training. Capturing outdoor environments offers extended horizon scenes but…
Miniature multi-rotors are promising robots for navigating subterranean networks, but maintaining a radio connection underground is challenging. In this paper, we introduce a distributed algorithm, called U-Chain (for Underground-chain),…
This paper presents algorithms to navigate and avoid obstacles for an in-door autonomous mobile robot. A laser range finder is used to obtain 3D images of the environment. A new algorithm, namely 3D-to-2D image pressure and barriers…
Robots are increasingly operating in indoor environments designed for and shared with people. However, robots working safely and autonomously in uneven and unstructured environments still face great challenges. Many modern indoor…
We consider the problem of indoor building-scale social navigation, where the robot must reach a point goal as quickly as possible without colliding with humans who are freely moving around. Factors such as varying crowd densities,…
Communication is an important capability for multi-robot exploration because (1) inter-robot communication (comms) improves coverage efficiency and (2) robot-to-base comms improves situational awareness. Exploring comms-restricted (e.g.,…