Related papers: Autonomous Thermalling as a Partially Observable M…

This paper addresses the problem of robotic operations in the presence of adversarial forces. We presents a complete framework for survey operations: waypoint generation,modelling of forces and tuning the control. In many applications of…

Urban intersections represent a complex environment for autonomous vehicles with many sources of uncertainty. The vehicle must plan in a stochastic environment with potentially rapid changes in driver behavior. Providing an efficient…

We study the nonlinear observability of a systems states in view of how well they are observable and what control inputs would improve the convergence of their estimates. We use these insights to develop an observability-aware…

Perching allows unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to reduce energy consumption, remain anchored for surface sampling operations, or stably survey their surroundings. Previous efforts for perching on vertical surfaces have predominantly…

Recent technological advancements in small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have led to the development of companion UAVs. Similar to conventional companion robots, companion UAVs have the potential to assist us in our daily lives and…

This paper investigates the problem of energy-optimal control for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). To improve the endurance of AUVs, we propose a novel energy-optimal control scheme based on the economic model predictive control (MPC)…

Efficient path optimization for drones in search and rescue operations faces challenges, including limited visibility, time constraints, and complex information gathering in urban environments. We present a comprehensive approach to…

Small unmanned aircraft can help firefighters combat wildfires by providing real-time surveillance of the growing fires. However, guiding the aircraft autonomously given only wildfire images is a challenging problem. This work models noisy…

Among the auxiliary loads in light-duty vehicles, the air conditioning system is the single largest energy consumer. For electrified vehicles, the impact of heating and cooling loads becomes even more significant, as they compete with the…

This paper addresses the problem of optimal control of robotic sensing systems aimed at autonomous information gathering in scenarios such as environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and surveillance and reconnaissance. The information…

In this paper, an algorithm for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Traffic Management (UTM) for a finite number of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is proposed. This algorithm is developed by combining the Rapidly-Exploring Random Trees (RRT) and…

Autonomous navigation in unknown complex environment is still a hard problem, especially for small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with limited computation resources. In this paper, a neural network-based reactive controller is proposed for…

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are often used for navigating dangerous terrains, however they are difficult to pilot. Due to complex input-output mapping schemes, limited perception, the complex system dynamics and the need to maintain a…

Route planning for multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a series of translation and rotational steps from a given start location to the destination goal location. The goal of the route planning problem is to determine the most…

Digital documentation of large interiors of historical buildings is an exhausting task since most of the areas of interest are beyond typical human reach. We advocate the use of autonomous teams of multi-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles…

Model Predictive Control (MPC) is attracting tremendous attention in the autonomous driving task as a powerful control technique. The success of an MPC controller strongly depends on an accurate internal dynamics model. However, the static…

Rapid advancements in Artificial Intelligence have shifted the focus from traditional human-directed robots to fully autonomous ones that do not require explicit human control. These are commonly referred to as Human-on-the-Loop (HotL)…

This paper investigates a cooperative motion planning problem for large-scale connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) under limited communications, which addresses the challenges of high communication and computing resource requirements. Our…

Many processes, such as discrete event systems in engineering or population dynamics in biology, evolve in discrete space and continuous time. We consider the problem of optimal decision making in such discrete state and action space…

While autonomous multi-robots can achieve safe and coordinated navigation, they often struggle to adapt to unforeseen conditions and to capture operator-driven objectives in unstructured environments. We present a Virtual Reality (VR)-based…