Related papers: ORangE: Operational Range Estimation for Mobile Ro…
Certain forms of uncertainty that robotic systems encounter can be explicitly learned within the context of a known model, like parametric model uncertainties such as mass and moments of inertia. Quantifying such parametric uncertainty is…
Autonomous robots used in infrastructure inspection, space exploration and other critical missions operate in highly dynamic environments. As such, they must continually verify their ability to complete the tasks associated with these…
Learning has propelled the cutting edge of performance in robotic control to new heights, allowing robots to operate with high performance in conditions that were previously unimaginable. The majority of the work, however, assumes that the…
Robots are becoming more and more commonplace in many industry settings. This successful adoption can be partly attributed to (1) their increasingly affordable cost and (2) the possibility of developing intelligent, software-driven robots.…
Two core competencies of a mobile robot are to build a map of the environment and to estimate its own pose on the basis of this map and incoming sensor readings. To account for the uncertainties in this process, one typically employs…
The code performance of industrial robots is typically analyzed through CPU metrics, which overlook the physical impact of code on robot behavior. This study introduces a novel framework for assessing robot program performance from an…
Efficient exploration strategies are vital in tasks such as search-and-rescue missions and disaster surveying. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become particularly popular in such applications, promising to cover large areas at high…
We study the problem of planning the deployments of a group of mobile robots. While the problem and formulation can be used for many different problems, here we use a bridge inspection as the motivating application for the purpose of…
We study a problem of multi-agent exploration with behaviorally heterogeneous robots. Each robot maps its surroundings using SLAM and identifies a set of areas of interest (AoIs) or frontiers that are the most informative to explore next.…
The analysis of animal movement has gained attention recently. New continuous-time models and statistical methods have been developed to estimate some sets related to their movements, such as the home-range and the core-area among others,…
Robots and particularly drones are especially useful in exploring extreme environments that pose hazards to humans. To ensure safe operations in these situations, usually perceptually degraded and without good GNSS, it is critical to have a…
Energy harvesting offers an attractive and promising mechanism to power low-energy devices. However, it alone is insufficient to enable an energy-neutral operation, which can eliminate tedious battery charging and replacement requirements.…
We consider problems in which a mobile robot samples an unknown function defined over its operating space, so as to find a global optimum of this function. The path traveled by the robot matters, since it influences energy and time…
Cooperation in multi-agent and multi-robot systems can help agents build various formations, shapes, and patterns presenting corresponding functions and purposes adapting to different situations. Relationships between agents such as their…
The vast majority of existing Distributed Computing literature about mobile robotic swarms considers computability issues: characterizing the set of system hypotheses that enables problem solvability. By contrast, the focus of this work is…
Accurate state-of-charge (SOC) estimation is essential for optimizing battery performance, ensuring safety, and maximizing economic value. Conventional current and voltage measurements, however, have inherent limitations in fully inferring…
Battery endurance represents a key challenge for long-term autonomy and long-range operations, especially in the case of aerial robots. In this paper, we propose AutoCharge, an autonomous charging solution for quadrotors that combines a…
Electrochemical batteries are ubiquitous devices in our society. When they are employed in mission-critical applications, the ability to precisely predict the end of discharge under highly variable environmental and operating conditions is…
We present a framework for Multi-Robot Task Allocation (MRTA) in heterogeneous teams performing long-endurance missions in dynamic scenarios. Given the limited battery of robots, especially for aerial vehicles, we allow for robot recharges…
Terrestrial-aerial bimodal vehicles, which integrate the high mobility of aerial robots with the long endurance of ground robots, offer significant potential for autonomous exploration. Given the inherent energy and time constraints in…