Related papers: Predicting Terrain Mechanical Properties in Sight …
Dynamic quadrupedal locomotion over rough terrains reveals remarkable progress over the last few decades. Small-scale quadruped robots are adequately flexible and adaptable to traverse uneven terrains along sagittal direction, such as…
Proprioceptive sensors on planetary rovers serve for state estimation and for understanding terrain and locomotion performance. While inertial measurement units (IMUs) are widely used to this effect, force-torque sensors are less explored…
Autonomous navigation at high speeds in off-road environments necessitates robots to comprehensively understand their surroundings using onboard sensing only. The extreme conditions posed by the off-road setting can cause degraded camera…
With the increasing demand for mobile robots and autonomous vehicles, several approaches for long-term robot navigation have been proposed. Among these techniques, ground segmentation and traversability estimation play important roles in…
The semantics of the environment, such as the terrain type and property, reveals important information for legged robots to adjust their behaviors. In this work, we present a framework that learns semantics-aware locomotion skills from…
Hazard detection is critical for enabling autonomous landing on planetary surfaces. Current state-of-the-art methods leverage traditional computer vision approaches to automate the identification of safe terrain from input digital elevation…
Navigating in off-road environments for wheeled mobile robots is challenging due to dynamic and rugged terrain. Traditional physics-based stability metrics, such as Static Stability Margin (SSM) or Zero Moment Point (ZMP) require knowledge…
Computer vision has become a major source of information for autonomous navigation of robots of various types, self-driving cars, military robots and mars/lunar rovers are some examples. Nevertheless, the majority of methods focus on…
Collapsing terrains, often present in search and rescue missions or planetary exploration, pose significant challenges for quadruped robots. This paper introduces a robust locomotion framework for safe navigation over unstable surfaces by…
Traversability estimation in off-road terrains is an essential procedure for autonomous navigation. However, creating reliable labels for complex interactions between the robot and the surface is still a challenging problem in…
Exploration of unknown, unstructured environments, such as in search and rescue, cave exploration, and planetary missions,presents significant challenges due to their unpredictable nature. This unpredictability can lead to inefficient path…
Looming, traditionally defined as the relative expansion of objects in the observer's retina, is a fundamental visual cue for perception of threat and can be used to accomplish collision free navigation. The measurement of the looming cue…
Wheeled robots have recently demonstrated superior mechanical capability to traverse vertically challenging terrain (e.g., extremely rugged boulders comparable in size to the vehicles themselves). Negotiating such terrain introduces…
Legged systems need to optimize contact force in order to maintain contacts. For this, the controller needs to have the knowledge of the surface geometry and how slippery the terrain is. We can use a vision system to realize the terrain,…
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…
This study proposes a schematic plan for in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) in Martian volcanic terrains. The work investigated the complexity of volcanic terrains and Martian environmental hazards and suggested comprehensive engineering…
To build commercial robots, skid-steering mechanical design is of increased popularity due to its manufacturing simplicity and unique mechanism. However, these also cause significant challenges on software and algorithm design, especially…
Recently, there has been a surge of international interest in extraterrestrial exploration targeting the Moon, Mars, the moons of Mars, and various asteroids. This contribution discusses how current state-of-the-art Earth-based testing for…
Estimating motion from spatiotemporal geoscientific data is a fundamental component of many environmental modeling and forecasting tasks. In this work, we propose a physics-informed deep learning framework for estimating altitude-wise…
In this work, a terrain estimation framework is developed for autonomous vehicles operating on deformable terrains. Previous work in this area usually relies on steady state tire operation, linearized classical terramechanics models, or on…