Related papers: Wayfinding through an unfamiliar environment
Real world visual navigation requires robots to operate in unfamiliar, human-occupied dynamic environments. Navigation around humans is especially difficult because it requires anticipating their future motion, which can be quite…
We use an immersive virtual reality environment to explore the intricate social cues that underlie non-verbal communication involved in a pedestrian's crossing decision. We "hack" non-verbal communication between pedestrian and vehicle by…
Future urban transportation concepts include a mixture of ground and air vehicles with varying degrees of autonomy in a congested environment. In such dynamic environments, occupancy maps alone are not sufficient for safe path planning.…
The problem of path planning in unknown environments remains a challenging problem - as the environment is gradually observed during the navigation, the underlying planner has to update the environment representation and replan, promptly…
Path planning is an important component in any highly automated vehicle system. In this report, the general problem of path planning is considered first in partially known static environments where only static obstacles are present but the…
Our understanding of how visual systems detect, analyze and interpret visual stimuli has advanced greatly. However, the visual systems of all animals do much more; they enable visual behaviours. How well the visual system performs while…
Navigation tasks in photorealistic 3D environments are challenging because they require perception and effective planning under partial observability. Recent work shows that map-like memory is useful for long-horizon navigation tasks.…
This paper considers the problem of efficient exploration of unseen environments, a key challenge in AI. We propose a `learning to explore' framework where we learn a policy from a distribution of environments. At test time, presented with…
Most path planners assume fully known, static environments, assumptions that fail when robots navigate in dynamic and partially observable environments. SMART-3D addresses these issues by real-time replanning, where it morphs the underlying…
Navigating through a visual maze relies on the strategic use of eye movements to select and identify the route. When navigating the maze, there are trade-offs between exploring to the environment and relying on memory. This study examined…
This paper explores the principles for transforming a quadrupedal robot into a guide robot for individuals with visual impairments. A guide robot has great potential to resolve the limited availability of guide animals that are accessible…
Objective: Micro-navigation poses challenges for blind and visually impaired individuals. They often need to ask for sighted assistance. We explored the feasibility of utilizing ChatGPT as a virtual assistant to provide navigation…
Navigation is an essential capability for mobile robots. In this paper, we propose a generalized yet effective 3M (i.e., multi-robot, multi-scenario, and multi-stage) training framework. We optimize a mapless navigation policy with a robust…
We present a robot navigation system that uses an imitation learning framework to successfully navigate in complex environments. Our framework takes a pre-built 3D scan of a real environment and trains an agent from pre-generated expert…
Fast and accurate path planning is important for ground robots to achieve safe and efficient autonomous navigation in unstructured outdoor environments. However, most existing methods exploiting either 2D or 2.5D maps struggle to balance…
Urban environments offer a challenging scenario for autonomous driving. Globally localizing information, such as a GPS signal, can be unreliable due to signal shadowing and multipath errors. Detailed a priori maps of the environment with…
For autonomous robots navigating in urban environments, it is important for the robot to stay on the designated path of travel (i.e., the footpath), and avoid areas such as grass and garden beds, for safety and social conformity…
Mobile robots rely on maps to navigate through an environment. In the absence of any map, the robots must build the map online from partial observations as they move in the environment. Traditional methods build a map using only direct…
Search and rescue environments exhibit challenging 3D geometry (e.g., confined spaces, rubble, and breakdown), which necessitates agile and maneuverable aerial robotic systems. Because these systems are size, weight, and power (SWaP)…
Remote sighted assistance (RSA) has emerged as a conversational assistive technology, where remote sighted workers, i.e., agents, provide real-time assistance to users with vision impairments via video-chat-like communication. Researchers…