Related papers: A Subterranean Virtual Cave World for Gazebo based…
A flexible topological representation consisting of a two-layer graph structure built on-board an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) by continuously filling the free space of an occupancy map with intersecting spheres is proposed in this…
Underground laboratories provide the low radioactive background environment necessary to explore the highest energy scales that cannot be reached with accelerators, by searching for extremely rare phenomena. I have requested to the…
Robotic navigation concerns the task in which a robot should be able to find a safe and feasible path and traverse between two points in a complex environment. We approach the problem of robotic navigation using reinforcement learning and…
Autonomous vehicles rely heavily upon their perception subsystems to see the environment in which they operate. Unfortunately, the effect of variable weather conditions presents a significant challenge to object detection algorithms, and…
Natural environments such as forests and grasslands are challenging for robotic navigation because of the false perception of rigid obstacles from high grass, twigs, or bushes. In this work, we propose Wild Visual Navigation (WVN), an…
Exploration in dynamic and uncertain real-world environments is an open problem in robotics and constitutes a foundational capability of autonomous systems operating in most of the real world. While 3D exploration planning has been…
In the real world, robots with embodiment face various issues such as dynamic continuous changes of the environment and input/output disturbances. The key to solving these issues can be found in daily life; people `do actions associated…
The request for fast response and safe operation after natural and man-made disasters in urban environments has spurred the development of robotic systems designed to assist in search and rescue operations within complex rubble sites.…
Human operators in human-robot teams are commonly perceived to be critical for mission success. To explore the direct and perceived impact of operator input on task success and team performance, 16 real-world missions (10 hrs) were…
One of the challenges faced by Autonomous Aerial Vehicles is reliable navigation through urban environments. Factors like reduction in precision of Global Positioning System (GPS), narrow spaces and dynamically moving obstacles make the…
Fieldwork still is the first and foremost source of insight in many disciplines of the geosciences. Virtual fieldwork is an approach meant to enable scientists trained in fieldwork to apply these skills to a virtual representation of…
Robots will bring search and rescue (SaR) in disaster response to another level, in case they can autonomously take over dangerous SaR tasks from humans. A main challenge for autonomous SaR robots is to safely navigate in cluttered…
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…
To achieve autonomy in complex real-world exploration missions, we consider deployment strategies for a team of robots with heterogeneous autonomy capabilities. In this work, we formulate a multi-robot exploration mission and compute an…
The Semantic Robot Vision Competition provided an excellent opportunity for our research lab to integrate our many ideas under one umbrella, inspiring both collaboration and new research. The task, visual search for an unknown object, is…
This article describes a guidance system of the autonomous underwater vehicle "DeepC" [1] in Special situations. A special situation occurs when one or more objects interfere with the planned route of a mission. The possible reactions are…
Autonomous exploration allows mobile robots to navigate in initially unknown territories in order to build complete representations of the environments. In many real-life applications, environments often contain dynamic obstacles which can…
Climate change is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century, and many in the robotics community are looking for ways to contribute. This paper presents a roadmap for climate-relevant robotics research, identifying high-impact…
Heterogeneous teams of robots, leveraging a balance between autonomy and human interaction, bring powerful capabilities to the problem of exploring dangerous, unstructured subterranean environments. Here we describe the solution developed…
We present an experimental validation framework for space robotics that leverages underwater environments to approximate microgravity dynamics. While neutral buoyancy conditions make underwater robotics an excellent platform for space…