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Humans quickly solve tasks in novel systems with complex dynamics, without requiring much interaction. While deep reinforcement learning algorithms have achieved tremendous success in many complex tasks, these algorithms need a large number…
Robot-assisted navigation is a perfect example of a class of applications requiring flexible control approaches. When the human is reliable, the robot should concede space to their initiative. When the human makes inappropriate choices the…
In order to safely operate around humans, robots can employ predictive models of human motion. Unfortunately, these models cannot capture the full complexity of human behavior and necessarily introduce simplifying assumptions. As a result,…
Brought into the public discourse through investigative work by journalists and scholars, awareness of algorithmic harms is at an all-time high. An increasing amount of research has been conducted under the banner of enhancing responsible…
Multi-robot motion planning problems often have many local minima. It is essential to visualize those local minima such that we can better understand, debug and interact with multi-robot systems. Towards this goal, we present the…
High-performance autonomy often must operate at the boundaries of safety. When external agents are present in a system, the process of ensuring safety without sacrificing performance becomes extremely difficult. In this paper, we present an…
Robotic manipulation stands as a largely unsolved problem despite significant advances in robotics and machine learning in recent years. One of the key challenges in manipulation is the exploration of the dynamics of the environment when…
The use of machine learning algorithms in finance, medicine, and criminal justice can deeply impact human lives. As a consequence, research into interpretable machine learning has rapidly grown in an attempt to better control and fix…
This paper presents an integrated system for performing precision harvesting missions using a legged harvester. Our harvester performs a challenging task of autonomous navigation and tree grabbing in a confined, GPS denied forest…
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…
Autonomous robotic exploration of unknown and hazardous environments, a long-standing challenge, can be significantly improved by leveraging the advanced reasoning of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). We introduce a novel exploration pipeline…
Exploration of unknown, unstructured environments, such as in search and rescue, cave exploration, and planetary missions,presents significant challenges due to their unpredictable nature. This unpredictability can lead to inefficient path…
Quadruped robots are proliferating in industrial environments where they carry sensor payloads and serve as autonomous inspection platforms. Despite the advantages of legged robots over their wheeled counterparts on rough and uneven…
Legged robots can pass through complex field environments by selecting gaits and discrete footholds carefully. Traditional methods plan gait and foothold separately and treat them as the single-step optimal process. However, such processing…
Search processes in the natural world are often punctuated by home returns that reset the position of foraging animals, birds, and insects. Many theoretical, numerical, and experimental studies have now demonstrated that this strategy can…
Complete tree search is a highly effective method for tackling MIP problems, and over the years, a plethora of branching heuristics have been introduced to further refine the technique for varying problems. Recently, portfolio algorithms…
Automation in farming processes is a growing field of research in both academia and industries. A considerable amount of work has been put into this field to develop systems robust enough for farming. Terrace farming, in particular,…
Mobile robots are traditionally developed to be reactive and avoid collisions with surrounding humans, often moving in unnatural ways without following social protocols, forcing people to behave very differently from human-human interaction…
Classically, the development of humanoid robots has been sequential and iterative. Such bottom-up design procedures rely heavily on intuition and are often biased by the designer's experience. Exploiting the non-linear coupled design space…
Planning motions to grasp an object in cluttered and uncertain environments is a challenging task, particularly when a collision-free trajectory does not exist and objects obstructing the way are required to be carefully grasped and moved…