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The techniques of precision agriculture include the possibility to execute crop monitoring tasks through the application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). These platforms are flexible, easy to use and low-cost, and they are the best…

We present the results of experiments performed using a small autonomous underwater vehicle to determine the location of an isobath within a bounded area. The primary contribution of this work is to implement and integrate several recent…

Thanks to their quick placement and high flexibility, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be very useful in the current and future wireless communication systems. With a growing number of smart devices and infrastructure-free communication…

Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become a focal point of research, with both established companies and startups investing heavily in their development. This paper presents our iterative process in developing a robust autonomous…

The ability to perform autonomous exploration is essential for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) operating in unstructured or unknown environments where it is hard or even impossible to describe the environment beforehand. However, algorithms…

This paper presents a novel autonomous drone-based smoke plume tracking system capable of navigating and tracking plumes in highly unsteady atmospheric conditions. The system integrates advanced hardware and software and a comprehensive…

We study planning problems where autonomous agents operate inside environments that are subject to uncertainties and not fully observable. Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are a natural formal model to capture such…

This article addresses obstacle avoidance motion planning for autonomous vehicles, specifically focusing on highway overtaking maneuvers. The control design challenge is handled by considering a mathematical vehicle model that captures both…

As autonomous vehicles continue to revolutionize transportation, addressing challenges posed by adverse weather conditions, particularly during winter, becomes paramount for ensuring safe and efficient operations. One of the most important…

Shared autonomy provides an effective framework for human-robot collaboration that takes advantage of the complementary strengths of humans and robots to achieve common goals. Many existing approaches to shared autonomy make restrictive…

Autonomy of devices is a major challenge in many Internet of Things (IoT) applications, in particular when the nodes are deployed remotely or difficult to assess places. In this paper we present an approach to provide energy to these…

Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs) provide an effective way to actualize applications such as environment monitoring, search and rescue, and scientific researches. However, the conventional ASVs depends overly on the stored energy. Hybrid…

An autonomous indoor aerial vehicle requires reliable simul- taneous localization and mapping (SLAM), accurate flight control, and robust path planning for navigation. This paper presents a system level combination of these existing…

Robots operating in real-world environments must reason about possible outcomes of stochastic actions and make decisions based on partial observations of the true world state. A major challenge for making accurate and robust action…

Aerial cargo transport is anticipated to play a pivotal role in the distribution of goods within urban environments. The shift is propelled by the surge in e-commerce, the imperative to deliver essential supplies to isolated areas, and the…

Autonomous systems rely on sensors to estimate the environment around them. However, cameras, LiDARs, and RADARs have their own limitations. In nighttime or degraded environments such as fog, mist, or dust, thermal cameras can provide…

Autonomous robots can benefit greatly from human-provided semantic characterizations of uncertain task environments and states. However, the development of integrated strategies which let robots model, communicate, and act on such 'soft…

As robot autonomy improves, robots are increasingly being considered in the role of autonomous observation systems -- free-flying cameras capable of actively tracking human activity within some predefined area of interest. In this work, we…

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are a natural model for planning problems where effects of actions are nondeterministic and the state of the world is not completely observable. It is difficult to solve POMDPs…

Non-Hermitian dynamics in open systems can give rise to a variety of fascinating non-equilibrium phenomena, ranging from symmetry-breaking transitions to directional energy flow. Parity-time (PT) symmetry breaking determines the occurrence…