Related papers: On the Potential of Smarter Multi-layer Maps
When does a robot planner need a map? Reactive methods that use only the robot's current sensor data and local information are fast and flexible, but prone to getting stuck in local minima. Is there a middle-ground between fully reactive…
Semantic mapping is the incremental process of "mapping" relevant information of the world (i.e., spatial information, temporal events, agents and actions) to a formal description supported by a reasoning engine. Current research focuses on…
In this paper we introduce a knowledge engine, which learns and shares knowledge representations, for robots to carry out a variety of tasks. Building such an engine brings with it the challenge of dealing with multiple data modalities…
With large language models, robots can understand language more flexibly and more capable than ever before. This survey reviews and situates recent literature into a spectrum with two poles: 1) mapping between language and some manually…
For robotic vehicles to navigate safely and efficiently in pedestrian-rich environments, it is important to model subtle human behaviors and navigation rules (e.g., passing on the right). However, while instinctive to humans, socially…
This paper addresses the problem of the communication of optimally compressed information for mobile robot path-planning. In this context, mobile robots compress their current local maps to assist another robot in reaching a target in an…
Embodied robots which can interact with their environment and neighbours are increasingly being used as a test case to develop Artificial Intelligence. This creates a need for multimodal robot controllers that can operate across different…
Recent years have seen an increasing number of applications that have a natural language interface, either in the form of chatbots or via personal assistants such as Alexa (Amazon), Google Assistant, Siri (Apple), and Cortana (Microsoft).…
Robots that can manipulate objects in unstructured environments and collaborate with humans can benefit immensely by understanding natural language. We propose a pipelined architecture of two stages to perform spatial reasoning on the text…
Autonomous mobile robots (e.g., warehouse logistics robots) often need to traverse complex, obstacle-rich, and changing environments to reach multiple fixed goals (e.g., warehouse shelves). Traditional motion planners need to calculate the…
Robotic and animal mapping systems share many challenges and characteristics: they must function in a wide variety of environmental conditions, enable the robot or animal to navigate effectively to find food or shelter, and be…
One of the current trends in robotics is to employ large language models (LLMs) to provide non-predefined command execution and natural human-robot interaction. It is useful to have an environment map together with its language…
A significant challenge in service robots is the semantic understanding of their surrounding areas. Traditional approaches addressed this problem by segmenting the floor plan into regions corresponding to full rooms that are assigned labels…
Intelligent embodied agents (e.g. robots) need to perform complex semantic tasks in unfamiliar environments. Among many skills that the agents need to possess, building and maintaining a semantic map of the environment is most crucial in…
Elevation maps are commonly used to represent the environment of mobile robots and are instrumental for locomotion and navigation tasks. However, pure geometric information is insufficient for many field applications that require appearance…
We are developing a system for human-robot communication that enables people to communicate with robots in a natural way and is focused on solving problems in a shared space. Our strategy for developing this system is fundamentally…
Autonomous robots operating in large knowledgeintensive domains require planning in the discrete (task) space and the continuous (motion) space. In knowledge-intensive domains, on the one hand, robots have to reason at the highestlevel, for…
Within the field of automated driving, a clear trend in environment perception tends towards more sensors, higher redundancy, and overall increase in computational power. This is mainly driven by the paradigm to perceive the entire…
Robots need robust and flexible vision systems to perceive and reason about their environments beyond geometry. Most of such systems build upon deep learning approaches. As autonomous robots are commonly deployed in initially unknown…
The ability to autonomously navigate in unknown environments is important for mobile robots. The map is the core component to achieve this. Most map representations rely on drift-free state estimation and provide a global metric map to…