Related papers: Robotic Exploration of Unknown 2D Environment Usin…
We consider the problems of exploration and point-goal navigation in previously unseen environments, where the spatial complexity of indoor scenes and partial observability constitute these tasks challenging. We argue that learning…
This paper addresses the problem of planning a safe (i.e., collision-free) trajectory from an initial state to a goal region when the obstacle space is a-priori unknown and is incrementally revealed online, e.g., through line-of-sight…
Autonomous robots are often employed for data collection due to their efficiency and low labour costs. A key task in robotic data acquisition is planning paths through an initially unknown environment to collect observations given…
Last-mile delivery systems commonly propose the use of autonomous robotic vehicles to increase scalability and efficiency. The economic inefficiency of collecting accurate prior maps for navigation motivates the use of planning algorithms…
We study informative path planning (IPP) with travel budgets in cluttered environments, where an agent collects measurements of a latent field modeled as a Gaussian process (GP) to reduce uncertainty at target locations. Graph-based solvers…
Autonomous robot teams navigating partially known environments face costly backtracking when ground robots encounter blocked roads that are only revealed upon physical traversal. We address this with Scout-Assisted Planning, a heterogeneous…
Robotic exploration of unknown environments is fundamentally a problem of decision making under uncertainty where the robot must account for uncertainty in sensor measurements, localization, action execution, as well as many other factors.…
Autonomous 3D acquisition of outdoor environments poses special challenges. Different from indoor scenes, where the room space is delineated by clear boundaries and separations (e.g., walls and furniture), an outdoor environment is spacious…
Fast and accurate path planning is important for ground robots to achieve safe and efficient autonomous navigation in unstructured outdoor environments. However, most existing methods exploiting either 2D or 2.5D maps struggle to balance…
When robots are deployed in the field for environmental monitoring they typically execute pre-programmed motions, such as lawnmower paths, instead of adaptive methods, such as informative path planning. One reason for this is that adaptive…
Adaptive information sampling approaches enable efficient selection of mobile robot's waypoints through which accurate sensing and mapping of a physical process, such as the radiation or field intensity, can be obtained. This paper analyzes…
The existing volumetric gain for robotic exploration is calculated in the 3D occupancy map, while the sampling-based exploration method is extended in the reachable (free) space. The inconsistency between them makes the existing calculation…
Autonomous robotic exploration of unknown and hazardous environments, a long-standing challenge, can be significantly improved by leveraging the advanced reasoning of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). We introduce a novel exploration pipeline…
This paper presents a novel interaction planning method that exploits impedance tuning techniques in response to environmental uncertainties and unpredictable conditions using haptic information only. The proposed algorithm plans the…
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…
In this paper, we present an autonomous navigation system for goal-driven exploration of unknown environments through deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Points of interest (POI) for possible navigation directions are obtained from the…
Autonomous exploration is a complex task where the robot moves through an unknown environment with the goal of mapping it. The desired output of such a process is a sequence of paths that efficiently and safely minimise the uncertainty of…
We present a method for autonomous exploration of large-scale unknown environments under mission time constraints. We start by proposing the Frontloaded Information Gain Orienteering Problem (FIG-OP) -- a generalization of the traditional…
Information gathering algorithms play a key role in unlocking the potential of robots for efficient data collection in a wide range of applications. However, most existing strategies neglect the fundamental problem of the robot pose…
Randomized sampling based algorithms are widely used in robot motion planning due to the problem's intractability, and are experimentally effective on a wide range of problem instances. Most variants bias their sampling using various…