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Legged rovers provide enhanced mobility compared to wheeled platforms, enabling navigation on steep and irregular planetary terrains. However, traditional legged locomotion might be energetically inefficient and potentially dangerous to the…
Although ground robotic autonomy has gained widespread usage in structured and controlled environments, autonomy in unknown and off-road terrain remains a difficult problem. Extreme, off-road, and unstructured environments such as…
Estimation of tactile properties from vision, such as slipperiness or roughness, is important to effectively interact with the environment. These tactile properties help us decide which actions we should choose and how to perform them.…
Most traversability estimation techniques divide off-road terrain into traversable (e.g., pavement, gravel, and grass) and non-traversable (e.g., boulders, vegetation, and ditches) regions and then inform subsequent planners to produce…
In order to improve offline map matching accuracy of low-sampling-rate GPS, a map matching algorithm based on conditional random fields (CRF) and route preference mining is proposed. In this algorithm, road offset distance and the…
Estimating terrain traversability in off-road environments requires reasoning about complex interaction dynamics between the robot and these terrains. However, it is challenging to create informative labels to learn a model in a supervised…
Achieving safe quadrupedal locomotion in real-world environments has attracted much attention in recent years. When walking over uneven terrain, achieving reliable estimation and realising safety-critical control based on the obtained…
This paper introduces a statistical model and corresponding sequential Bayesian estimation method for terrain-based navigation using side-scan sonar (SSS) data. The presented approach relies on slant range measurements extracted from the…
Quadrupedal mobile robots can traverse a wider range of terrain types than their wheeled counterparts but do not perform the same on all terrain types. These robots are prone to undesirable behaviours like sinking and slipping on…
In target-driven navigation and autonomous exploration, reasonable prediction of unknown regions is crucial for efficient navigation and environment understanding. Existing methods mostly focus on single objects or geometric occupancy maps,…
Adding tactile sensors to a robotic system is becoming a common practice to achieve more complex manipulation skills than those robotics systems that only use external cameras to manipulate objects. The key of tactile sensors is that they…
Near-surface atmospheric conditions can differ sharply over tens to hundreds of meters due to land cover and topography, yet this variability is absent from current weather analyses and forecasts. It is unclear whether such meter-scale…
For navigation of robots, image segmentation is an important component to determining a terrain's traversability. For safe and efficient navigation, it is key to assess the uncertainty of the predicted segments. Current uncertainty…
Compensating for slip and skid is crucial for mobile robots navigating outdoor terrains. In these challenging environments, slipping and skidding introduce uncertainties into trajectory tracking systems, potentially compromising the safety…
The Mars Perseverance rover applies computer vision for navigation and hazard avoidance. The challenge to do onboard object recognition highlights the need for low-power, customized training, often including low-contrast backgrounds. We…
We present a novel autonomous robot navigation algorithm for outdoor environments that is capable of handling diverse terrain traversability conditions. Our approach, VLM-GroNav, uses vision-language models (VLMs) and integrates them with…
Safely handling objects and avoiding slippage are fundamental challenges in robotic manipulation, yet traditional techniques often oversimplify the issue by treating slippage as a binary occurrence. Our research presents a framework that…
Traversability estimation in rugged, unstructured environments remains a challenging problem in field robotics. Often, the need for precise, accurate traversability estimation is in direct opposition to the limited sensing and compute…
This paper considers outdoor terrain mapping using RGB images obtained from an aerial vehicle. While feature-based localization and mapping techniques deliver real-time vehicle odometry and sparse keypoint depth reconstruction, a dense…
This Engineering Note addresses the challenge of estimating the probability of collision for tethered spacecraft during close encounters with other space objects. Standard probability of collision methods, based on spherical hard-body…