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Dynamic locomotion in rough terrain requires accurate foot placement, collision avoidance, and planning of the underactuated dynamics of the system. Reliably optimizing for such motions and interactions in the presence of imperfect and…
Today, mobile robots are expected to carry out increasingly complex tasks in multifarious, real-world environments. Often, the tasks require a certain semantic understanding of the workspace. Consider, for example, spoken instructions from…
Accurate and robust navigation in unstructured environments requires fusing data from multiple sensors. Such fusion ensures that the robot is better aware of its surroundings, including areas of the environment that are not immediately…
Onboard visual sensing has been widely used in the unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) and/or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), which can be modeled as dynamic systems on SE(3). The onboard sensing outputs of the dynamic system can usually be…
Construction robots operate in unstructured construction sites, where effective visual perception is crucial for ensuring safe and seamless operations. However, construction robots often handle large elements and perform tasks across…
Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have the potential to be employed for surveillance and monitoring tasks. By perching and staring on one or multiple locations aerial robots can save energy while concurrently increasing their overall…
We propose an autonomous exploration algorithm designed for decentralized multi-robot teams, which takes into account map and localization uncertainties of range-sensing mobile robots. Virtual landmarks are used to quantify the combined…
We study the problem of learning a navigation policy for a robot to actively search for an object of interest in an indoor environment solely from its visual inputs. While scene-driven visual navigation has been widely studied, prior…
Automotive self-localization is an essential task for any automated driving function. This means that the vehicle has to reliably know its position and orientation with an accuracy of a few centimeters and degrees, respectively. This paper…
Like humans who rely on landmarks for orientation, autonomous robots depend on feature-rich environments for accurate localization. In this paper, we propose the GFM-Planner, a perception-aware trajectory planning framework based on the…
Machine perception is an important prerequisite for safe interaction and locomotion in dynamic environments. This requires not only the timely perception of surrounding geometries and distances but also the ability to react to changing…
Autonomous vehicles such as the Mars rovers currently lead the vanguard of surface exploration on extraterrestrial planets and moons. In order to accelerate the pace of exploration and science objectives, it is critical to plan safe and…
Autonomous planetary vehicles, also known as rovers, are small autonomous vehicles equipped with a variety of sensors used to perform exploration and experiments on a planet's surface. Rovers work in a partially unknown environment, with…
Visually-guided underwater robots are deployed alongside human divers for cooperative exploration, inspection, and monitoring tasks in numerous shallow-water and coastal-water applications. The most essential capability of such companion…
For safe operation, a robot must be able to avoid collisions in uncertain environments. Existing approaches for motion planning under uncertainties often assume parametric obstacle representations and Gaussian uncertainty, which can be…
Space missions generate massive volumes of high-resolution orbital and surface imagery that far exceed the capacity for manual inspection. Detecting rare phenomena is scientifically critical, yet traditional supervised learning struggles…
Spacecraft entering Mars require precise navigation algorithms capable of accurately estimating the vehicle's position and velocity in dynamic and uncertain atmospheric environments. Discrepancies between the true Martian atmospheric…
Algorithms for motion planning in unknown environments are generally limited in their ability to reason about the structure of the unobserved environment. As such, current methods generally navigate unknown environments by relying on…
Aerial navigation on Mars requires vision-based pipelines that are robust to the diverse illumination conditions and terrain morphology of the Martian surface. A key bottleneck for training and evaluating such methods is the scarcity of…
In this field report, we detail the lessons learned from our field expedition to collect Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) data in a Mars analog environment for the purpose of validating GPR localization techniques in rugged environments.…