Related papers: Inexact Loops in Robotics Problems
In condensed matter physics and related areas, topological defects play important roles in phase transitions and critical phenomena. Homotopy theory facilitates the classification of such topological defects. After a pedagogic introduction…
In the classical context of robotic mapping and localization, map matching is typically defined as the task of finding a rigid transformation (i.e., 3DOF rotation/translation on the 2D moving plane) that aligns the query and reference maps…
Autonomous robotic inspection, where a robot moves through its environment and inspects points of interest, has applications in industrial settings, structural health monitoring, and medicine. Planning the paths for a robot to safely and…
Autonomous robots have real-world applications in diverse fields, such as mobile manipulation and environmental exploration, and many such tasks benefit from a hands-off approach in terms of human user involvement over a long task horizon.…
In many mobile robotics scenarios, such as drone racing, the goal is to generate a trajectory that passes through multiple waypoints in minimal time. This problem is referred to as time-optimal planning. State-of-the-art approaches either…
Mapping is a time-consuming process for deploying robotic systems to new environments. The handling of maps is also risk-adverse when not managed effectively. We propose here, a standardised approach to handling such maps in a manner which…
Robotic manipulation research has investigated contact-rich problems and strategies that require robots to intentionally collide with their environment, to accomplish tasks that cannot be handled by traditional collision-free solutions. By…
Highly constrained manipulation tasks continue to be challenging for autonomous robots as they require high levels of precision, typically less than 1mm, which is often incompatible with what can be achieved by traditional perception…
In this paper we study a notion of topological complexity for the motion planning problem. The topological complexity is a number which measures discontinuity of the process of motion planning in the configuration space X. More precisely,…
We consider the problem of grasping in clutter. While there have been motion planners developed to address this problem in recent years, these planners are mostly tailored for open-loop execution. Open-loop execution in this domain,…
Understanding why models behave the way they do is critical to learning from them, and to conveying the insights they offer to a broad audience. The Loops that Matter methodology automatically shows which loops are dominating behavior at…
We consider nonconvex obstacle avoidance where a robot described by nonlinear dynamics and a nonconvex shape has to avoid nonconvex obstacles. Obstacle avoidance is a fundamental problem in robotics and well studied in control. However,…
Loop closure can effectively correct the accumulated error in robot localization, which plays a critical role in the long-term navigation of the robot. Traditional appearance-based methods rely on local features and are prone to failure in…
In this article we consider the problem of tether entanglement for tethered mobile robots. One of the main risks of using a tethered connection between a mobile robot and an anchor point is that the tether may get entangled with the…
We design a motion planning algorithm to coordinate the movements of two robots along a figure eight track, in such a way that no collisions occur. We use a topological approach to robot motion planning that relates instabilities in motion…
Many scientific and engineering applications feature nonsmooth convex minimization problems over convex sets. In this paper, we address an important instance of this broad class where we assume that the nonsmooth objective is equipped with…
Loop quantum gravity is a mature theory. To proceed to explicit calculations in cosmology, it is necessary to make assumptions and simplifications based on the symmetries of the cosmological setting. Symmetry reduction is especially…
The language and methods of algebraic topology, particularly homotopy theory, have been extensively used in the study of the identification, the classification and the evolution of defects. Topological methods provide the means for the…
This paper addresses planning and control of robot motion under uncertainty that is formulated as a continuous-time, continuous-space stochastic optimal control problem, by developing a topology-guided path integral control method. The path…
In order to develop provably safe human-in-the-loop systems, accurate and precise models of human behavior must be developed. In the case of intelligent vehicles, one can imagine the need for predicting driver behavior to develop minimally…