Related papers: Autonomous Cave Surveying with an Aerial Robot

Exploration of extreme environments, including caves, canyons and cliffs on low-gravity surfaces such as the Moon, Mars and asteroids can provide insight into the geological history of the solar system, origins of water, life and prospect…

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…

In the last twenty years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have garnered growing interest due to their expanding applications in both military and civilian domains. Detecting non-cooperative aerial vehicles with efficiency and estimating…

Exploration of unknown environments is a fundamental problem in robotics and an essential component in numerous applications of autonomous systems. A major challenge in exploring unknown environments is that the robot has to plan with the…

We present a novel system, AdVENTR for autonomous robot navigation in unstructured outdoor environments that consist of uneven and vegetated terrains. Our approach is general and can enable both wheeled and legged robots to handle outdoor…

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with bioradars are a life-saving technology that can enable identification of survivors under collapsed buildings in the aftermath of natural disasters such as earthquakes or gas explosions. However,…

Research on coastal regions traditionally involves methods like manual sampling, monitoring buoys, and remote sensing, but these methods face challenges in spatially and temporally diverse regions of interest. Autonomous surface vehicles…

Tunnel construction using the drill-and-blast method requires the 3D measurement of the excavation front to evaluate underbreak locations. Considering the inspection and measurement task's safety, cost, and efficiency, deploying lightweight…

Detecting objects of interest, such as human survivors, safety equipment, and structure access points, is critical to any search-and-rescue operation. Robots deployed for such time-sensitive efforts rely on their onboard sensors to perform…

Navigating safely in urban environments remains a challenging problem for autonomous vehicles. Occlusion and limited sensor range can pose significant challenges to safely navigate among pedestrians and other vehicles in the environment.…

Autonomous robots deployed in shared human environments, such as agricultural settings, require rigorous safety assurance to meet both functional reliability and regulatory compliance. These systems must operate in dynamic, unstructured…

Search and rescue with a team of heterogeneous mobile robots in unknown and large-scale underground environments requires high-precision localization and mapping. This crucial requirement is faced with many challenges in complex and…

Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used for exploration-driven monitoring in hazardous environments such as disaster zones, contaminated sites, wildfire areas, and damaged infrastructure, where limited flight endurance must be…

Autonomous systems can be used to search for sparse signals in a large space; e.g., aerial robots can be deployed to localize threats, detect gas leaks, or respond to distress calls. Intuitively, search algorithms may increase efficiency by…

This paper presents an autonomous navigation system for ground robots traversing aggressive unstructured terrain through a cohesive arrangement of mapping, deliberative planning and reactive behaviour modules. All systems are aware of…

The ability to determine the pose of a rover in an inertial frame autonomously is a crucial capability necessary for the next generation of surface rover missions on other planetary bodies. Currently, most on-going rover missions utilize…

In the field of modern robotics, robots are proving to be useful in tackling high-risk situations, such as navigating hazardous environments like burning buildings, earthquake-stricken areas, or patrolling crime-ridden streets, as well as…

Nowadays, there are outstanding strides towards a future with autonomous vehicles on our roads. While the perception of autonomous vehicles performs well under closed-set conditions, they still struggle to handle the unexpected. This survey…

In this paper, we present CaveSeg - the first visual learning pipeline for semantic segmentation and scene parsing for AUV navigation inside underwater caves. We address the problem of scarce annotated training data by preparing a…

Robust depth perception in visually-degraded environments is crucial for autonomous aerial systems. Thermal imaging cameras, which capture infrared radiation, are robust to visual degradation. However, due to lack of a large-scale dataset,…