Related papers: Autonomous Outdoor Scanning via Online Topological…
We consider how to directly extract a road map (also known as a topological representation) of an initially-unknown 2-dimensional environment via an online procedure that robustly computes a retraction of its boundaries. In this article, we…
Currently, state-of-the-art exploration methods maintain high-resolution map representations in order to optimize exploration goals in each step that maximizes information gain. However, during exploring, those "optimal" selections could…
The capability of autonomous exploration in complex, unknown environments is important in many robotic applications. While recent research on autonomous exploration have achieved much progress, there are still limitations, e.g., existing…
For autonomous robots navigating in urban environments, it is important for the robot to stay on the designated path of travel (i.e., the footpath), and avoid areas such as grass and garden beds, for safety and social conformity…
Many robotics applications benefit from being able to compute multiple locally optimal paths in a given configuration space. Examples include path planning for of tethered robots with cable-length constraints, systems involving cables,…
Panoramic RGB-D cameras are known for their ability to produce high quality 3D scene reconstructions. However, operating these cameras involves manually selecting viewpoints and physically transporting the camera, making the generation of a…
Autonomous robots navigating in off-road terrain like forests open new opportunities for automation. While off-road navigation has been studied, existing work often relies on clearly delineated pathways. We present a method allowing for…
Ground robots navigating in complex, dynamic environments must compute collision-free trajectories to avoid obstacles safely and efficiently. Nonconvex optimization is a popular method to compute a trajectory in real-time. However, these…
Surveillance and exploration of large environments is a tedious task. In spaces with limited environmental cues, random-like search is an effective approach as it allows the robot to perform online coverage of environments using simple…
Drones equipped with cameras are emerging as a powerful tool for large-scale aerial 3D scanning, but existing automatic flight planners do not exploit all available information about the scene, and can therefore produce inaccurate and…
Mapping is one of the crucial tasks enabling autonomous navigation of a mobile robot. Conventional mapping methods output a dense geometric map representation, e.g. an occupancy grid, which is not trivial to keep consistent for prolonged…
Path planning for robotic coverage is the task of determining a collision-free robot trajectory that observes all points of interest in an environment. Robots employed for such tasks are often capable of exercising active control over…
Safe autonomous navigation in a priori unknown environments is an essential skill for mobile robots to reliably and adaptively perform diverse tasks (e.g., delivery, inspection, and interaction) in unstructured cluttered environments.…
In this work, we introduce SPADE, a path planning framework designed for autonomous navigation in dynamic environments using 3D scene graphs. SPADE combines hierarchical path planning with local geometric awareness to enable collision-free…
Path Planning and target searching in a three-dimensional environment is a challenging task in the field of robotics. It is an optimization problem as the path from source to destination has to be optimal. This paper aims to generate a…
The ability to plan informative paths online is essential to robot autonomy. In particular, sampling-based approaches are often used as they are capable of using arbitrary information gain formulations. However, they are prone to local…
In recent years, mobile robots are becoming ambitious and deployed in large-scale scenarios. Serving as a high-level understanding of environments, a sparse skeleton graph is beneficial for more efficient global planning. Currently,…
We introduce a new method that efficiently computes a set of viewpoints and trajectories for high-quality 3D reconstructions in outdoor environments. Our goal is to automatically explore an unknown area, and obtain a complete 3D scan of a…
Navigation in complex 3D scenarios requires appropriate environment representation for efficient scene understanding and trajectory generation. We propose a highly efficient and extensible global navigation framework based on a tomographic…
This paper proposes a novel method of coverage path planning for the purpose of scanning an unstructured environment autonomously. The method uses the morphological skeleton of the prior 2D navigation map via SLAM to generate a sequence of…