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Robotic and human lunar landings are a focus of future NASA missions. Precision landing capabilities are vital to guarantee the success of the mission, and the safety of the lander and crew. During the approach to the surface there are…
The increasingly complex and diverse planetary exploration environment requires more adaptable and flexible rover navigation strategy. In this study, we propose a VLM-empowered multi-mode system to achieve efficient while safe autonomous…
As mobile robots become useful performing everyday tasks in complex real-world environments, they must be able to traverse a range of difficult terrain types such as stairs, stepping stones, gaps, jumps and narrow passages. This work…
This paper presents a soft earthworm robot that is capable of both efficient locomotion and obstacle avoidance. The robot is designed to replicate the unique locomotion mechanisms of earthworms, which enable them to move through narrow and…
Robot-aided exploration of planetary surfaces is essential for understanding geologic processes, yet many scientifically valuable regions, such as Martian dunes and lunar craters, remain hazardous due to loose, deformable regolith. We…
Lunar caves are promising features for long-term and permanent human presence on the moon. However, given their inaccessibility to imaging from survey satellites, the concrete environment within the underground cavities is not well known.…
Lunar exploration has become a key focus, driving scientific and technological advances. Ongoing missions are deploying rovers to the surface of the Moon, targeting the far side and south pole. However, these terrains pose challenges,…
In an era marked by renewed interest in lunar exploration and the prospect of establishing a sustainable human presence on the Moon, innovative approaches supporting mission preparation and astronaut training are imperative. To this end,…
We present Visual Navigation and Locomotion over obstacles (ViNL), which enables a quadrupedal robot to navigate unseen apartments while stepping over small obstacles that lie in its path (e.g., shoes, toys, cables), similar to how humans…
Robotics plays a pivotal role in planetary science and exploration, where autonomous and reliable systems are crucial due to the risks and challenges inherent to space environments. The establishment of permanent lunar bases demands robotic…
Despite the progress in legged robotic locomotion, autonomous navigation in unknown environments remains an open problem. Ideally, the navigation system utilizes the full potential of the robots' locomotion capabilities while operating…
Development of navigation algorithms is essential for the successful deployment of robots in rapidly changing hazardous environments for which prior knowledge of configuration is often limited or unavailable. Use of traditional…
We exploit the complementary strengths of vision and proprioception to develop a point-goal navigation system for legged robots, called VP-Nav. Legged systems are capable of traversing more complex terrain than wheeled robots, but to fully…
Mobile robots in unstructured, mapless environments must rely on an obstacle avoidance module to navigate safely. The standard avoidance techniques estimate the locations of obstacles with respect to the robot but are unaware of the…
Humans can robustly follow a visual trajectory defined by a sequence of images (i.e. a video) regardless of substantial changes in the environment or the presence of obstacles. We aim at endowing similar visual navigation capabilities to…
Highly accurate real-time localization is of fundamental importance for the safety and efficiency of planetary rovers exploring the surface of Mars. Mars rover operations rely on vision-based systems to avoid hazards as well as plan safe…
The field of autonomous navigation for unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) is in continuous growth and increasing levels of autonomy have been reached in the last few years. However, the task becomes more challenging when the focus is on the…
Robust motion planning is a well-studied problem in the robotics literature, yet current algorithms struggle to operate scalably and safely in the presence of other moving agents, such as humans. This paper introduces a novel framework for…
This paper presents a study on the development of an obstacle-avoidance navigation system for autonomous navigation in home environments. The system utilizes vision-based techniques and advanced path-planning algorithms to enable the robot…
Building on the unprecedented capabilities of large language models for command understanding and zero-shot recognition of multi-modal vision-language transformers, visual language navigation (VLN) has emerged as an effective way to address…