Related papers: Kriging-Based Robotic Exploration for Soil Moistur…
We consider a robotic vehicle tasked with gathering information by visiting a set of spatially-distributed data sources, the locations of which are not known a priori, but are discovered on the fly. We assume a first-order robot dynamics…
Conservation agriculture features a soil surface covered with crop residues, which brings benefits of improving soil health and saving water. However, one significant challenge in conservation agriculture lies in precisely controlling the…
This paper presents a framework to enable a team of heterogeneous mobile robots to model and sense a multiscale system. We propose a coupled strategy, where robots of one type collect high-fidelity measurements at a slow time scale and…
For the past several decades, numerous attempts have been made to model the climate of Mars with extensive studies focusing on the planet's dynamics and the understanding of its climate. While physical modeling and data assimilation…
In this paper, we formulate and solve the intermittent deployment problem, which yields strategies that couple \emph{when} heterogeneous robots should sense an environmental process, with where a deployed team should sense in the…
Highly accurate real-time localization is of fundamental importance for the safety and efficiency of planetary rovers exploring the surface of Mars. Mars rover operations rely on vision-based systems to avoid hazards as well as plan safe…
In a developmental framework, autonomous robots need to explore the world and learn how to interact with it. Without an a priori model of the system, this opens the challenging problem of having robots master their interface with the world:…
In this paper, we design an information-based multi-robot source seeking algorithm where a group of mobile sensors localizes and moves close to a single source using only local range-based measurements. In the algorithm, the mobile sensors…
We present our general-purpose mobile manipulation system consisting of a custom robot platform and key algorithms spanning perception and planning. To extensively test the system in the wild and benchmark its performance, we choose a…
Geophysical methods offer several key advantages over conventional subsurface measurement approaches, yet their use for hydrologic interpretation is often problematic. Here, we introduce theory and concepts of a novel Bayesian approach for…
Robotic science missions in remote environments, such as deep ocean and outer space, can involve studying phenomena that cannot directly be observed using on-board sensors but must be deduced by combining measurements of correlated…
On construction sites, progress must be monitored continuously to ensure that the current state corresponds to the planned state in order to increase efficiency, safety and detect construction defects at an early stage. Autonomous mobile…
This project proposes a bioinspired multi-robot system using Distributed Optimization for efficient exploration and mapping of unknown environments. Each robot explores its environment and creates a map, which is afterwards put together to…
In precision agriculture and plant science, there is an increasing demand for wireless sensors that are easy to deploy, maintain, and monitor. This paper investigates a novel approach that leverages recent advances in extremely low-power…
This paper proposes a state-machine model for a multi-modal, multi-robot environmental sensing algorithm. This multi-modal algorithm integrates two different exploration algorithms: (1) coverage path planning using variable formations and…
We discuss the history and lessons learned from a series of deployments of environmental sensors measuring soil parameters and CO2 fluxes over the last fifteen years, in an outdoor environment. We present the hardware and software…
We present a framework for a ground-aerial robotic team to explore large, unstructured, and unknown environments. In such exploration problems, the effectiveness of existing exploration-boosting heuristics often scales poorly with the…
We present a cost-efficient and versatile method to map an unknown 3D freeform surface using only sparse measurements while the end-effector of a robotic manipulator moves along the surface. The geometry is locally approximated by a plane,…
In areas that are inaccessible to humans, such as the lunar surface and landslide sites, there is a need for multiple autonomous mobile robot systems that can replace human workers. In particular, at landslide sites such as river channel…
Tactile perception is an essential ability of intelligent robots in interaction with their surrounding environments. This perception as an intermediate level acts between sensation and action and has to be defined properly to generate…