Related papers: Autonomous Aerial Robotic Surveying and Mapping wi…
Autonomous terrain classification is an important problem in planetary navigation, whether the goal is to identify scientific sites of interest or to traverse treacherous areas safely. Past Martian rovers have relied on human operators to…
Design space exploration is an important but costly step involved in the design/deployment of custom architectures to squeeze out maximum possible performance and energy efficiency. Conventionally, optimizations require iterative sampling…
This paper presents a real-time control system for surface inspection using multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The UAVs are coordinated in a specific formation to collect data of the inspecting objects. The communication platform for…
We present a method for solving the coverage problem with the objective of autonomously exploring an unknown environment under mission time constraints. Here, the robot is tasked with planning a path over a horizon such that the accumulated…
Autonomous navigation is a long-standing field of robotics research, which provides an essential capability for mobile robots to execute a series of tasks on the same environments performed by human everyday. In this chapter, we present a…
The integration of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into large-scale artistic projects has emerged as a new application in robotics. This paper presents the design, deployment, and testing of a novel multi-drone system for…
This paper presents our approach to develop a method for an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) to perform inspection tasks in nuclear environments using rich information maps. To reduce inspectors' exposure to elevated radiation levels, an…
A computational system is called autonomous if it is able to make its own decisions, or take its own actions, without human supervision or control. The capability and spread of such systems have reached the point where they are beginning to…
As robots aspire for long-term autonomous operations in complex dynamic environments, the ability to reliably take mission-critical decisions in ambiguous situations becomes critical. This motivates the need to build systems that have…
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…
In this paper, we present an integrated solution to memory-efficient environment modeling by an autonomous mobile robot equipped with a laser range-finder. Majority of nowadays approaches to autonomous environment modeling, called…
This article presents a 3D point cloud map-merging framework for egocentric heterogeneous multi-robot exploration, based on overlap detection and alignment, that is independent of a manual initial guess or prior knowledge of the robots'…
This project aimed to develop an automated cinematography platform using an unmanned aerial vehicle. Quadcopters are a great platform for shooting aerial scenes but are difficult to maneuver smoothly and can require expertise to pilot. We…
We address the problem of efficient 3-D exploration in indoor environments for micro aerial vehicles with limited sensing capabilities and payload/power constraints. We develop an indoor exploration framework that uses learning to predict…
Autonomous exploration requires robots to generate informative trajectories iteratively. Although sampling-based methods are highly efficient in unmanned aerial vehicle exploration, many of these methods do not effectively utilize the…
In this paper, we propose a method that, given a partial grid map of an indoor environment built by an autonomous mobile robot, estimates the amount of the explored area represented in the map, as well as whether the uncovered part is still…
This paper addresses the challenge of active perception within autonomous navigation in complex, unknown environments. Revisiting the foundational principles of active perception, we introduce an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework…
Industrial facilities often require periodic visual inspections of key installations. Examining these points of interest is time consuming, potentially hazardous or require special equipment to reach. MAVs are ideal platforms to automate…
A key aspect of the precision of a mobile robots localization is the quality and aptness of the map it is using. A variety of mapping approaches are available that can be employed to create such maps with varying degrees of effort, hardware…
This paper presents a fully hardware synchronized mapping robot with support for a hardware synchronized external tracking system, for super-precise timing and localization. We also employ a professional, static 3D scanner for ground truth…