Related papers: L\'evy Flight Foraging Hypothesis-based Autonomous…
We consider the visual feature selection to improve the estimation quality required for the accurate navigation of a robot. We build upon a key property that asserts: contributions of trackable features (landmarks) appear linearly in the…
Modern agentic systems operate in environments with extremely large action spaces, such as tool-augmented language models with thousands of available APIs or retrieval operations. Despite this scale, empirical evidence suggests that only a…
We consider the problem of walking in an unknown street, for a robot that has a minimal sensing capability. The robot is equipped with a sensor that only detects the discontinuities in depth information (gaps) and can locate the target…
We develop a probabilistic framework for \emph{rendezvous planning}: given sparse, noisy observations of a fast-moving target, plan rendezvous spatiotemporal coordinates for a set of significantly slower seeking agents. The unknown target…
Autonomous exploration is a widely studied problem where a robot incrementally builds a map of a previously unknown environment. The robot selects the next locations to reach using an exploration strategy. To do so, the robot has to balance…
We address the generic problem of random search for a point-like target on a line. Using the measures of search reliability and efficiency to quantify the random search quality, we compare Brownian search with L\'evy search based on…
Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is still an open challenge. Classic methods rely on getting feedback via extrinsic rewards to train the agent, and in situations where this occurs very rarely the agent learns slowly or cannot…
We review some of our work regarding search which has been motivated by a variety of applications in engineering and technology, including traffic routing and security in communication networks, explosive mine detection and removal,…
Autonomous navigation in crowded environments is an open problem with many applications, essential for the coexistence of robots and humans in the smart cities of the future. In recent years, deep reinforcement learning approaches have…
Consider search on an infinite line involving an autonomous robot starting at the origin of the line and an oblivious moving target at initial distance $d \geq 1$ from it. The robot can change direction and move anywhere on the line with…
In unknown non-convex environments, such as indoor and underground spaces, deploying a fleet of robots to explore the surroundings while simultaneously searching for and tracking targets of interest to maintain high-precision data…
Most global optimization problems are nonlinear and thus difficult to solve, and they become even more challenging when uncertainties are present in objective functions and constraints. This paper provides a new two-stage hybrid search…
We introduce and study the general setting of weighted search in which a number of targets, each with a certain weight, are hidden in a star-like environment that consists of $m$ infinite, concurrent rays, with a common origin. A mobile…
Reinforcement learning in sparse-reward navigation environments with expensive and limited interactions is challenging and poses a need for effective exploration. Motivated by complex navigation tasks that require real-world training (when…
Consider a mobile robot tasked with localizing targets at unknown locations by obtaining relative measurements. The observations can be bearing or range measurements. How should the robot move so as to localize the targets and minimize the…
Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a strong alternative to solve optimization tasks efficiently. The use of these algorithms highly depends on the feedback signals provided by the environment in charge of informing about how good (or…
Many real-world robot learning problems, such as pick-and-place or arriving at a destination, can be seen as a problem of reaching a goal state as soon as possible. These problems, when formulated as episodic reinforcement learning tasks,…
These notes from a graduate class at the Unuversidad Autonoma de Madrid analyze a search behavior known as Area Resticted Search (ARS), widespread in the animal kingdom, and optimal when the resources that one is after are "patchy". In the…
1. Understanding how to find targets with very limited information is a topic of interest in many disciplines. In ecology, such research has often focused on the development of two movement models: i) the L\'evy walk and; ii) the composite…
Robot localization is a fundamental component of autonomous navigation in unknown environments. Among various sensing modalities, visual input from cameras plays a central role, enabling robots to estimate their position by tracking point…