Related papers: REAL: Rapid Exploration with Active Loop-Closing t…
Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) exhibit immense potential for navigating indoor and hard-to-reach areas, yet their significant constraints in payload and autonomy have largely prevented their use for complex tasks like high-quality…
The capabilities of autonomous flight with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have significantly increased in recent times. However, basic problems such as fast and robust geo-localization in GPS-denied environments still remain unsolved.…
This paper describes and analyzes a reactive navigation framework for mobile robots in unknown environments. The approach does not rely on a global map and only considers the local occupancy in its robot-centered 3D grid structure. The…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly utilized in global search and rescue efforts, enhancing operational efficiency. In these missions, a coordinated swarm of UAVs is deployed to efficiently cover expansive areas by capturing…
Autonomous exploration in unknown environments using mobile robots is the pillar of many robotic applications. Existing exploration frameworks either select the nearest geometric frontier or the nearest information-theoretic frontier.…
We present an efficient path planning algorithm for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle surveying a cluttered urban landscape. A special emphasis is on maximizing area surveyed while adhering to constraints of the UAV and partially known and…
This article presents a novel framework for performing visual inspection around 3D infrastructures, by establishing a team of fully autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) with robust localization, planning and perception capabilities. The…
Emergency communication is extremely important to aid rescue and search operation in the aftermath of any disaster. In such scenario, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) networks may be used to complement the damaged cellular networks over large…
Semantic maps represent the environment using a set of semantically meaningful objects. This representation is storage-efficient, less ambiguous, and more informative, thus facilitating large-scale autonomy and the acquisition of actionable…
In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are used for numerous inspection and video capture tasks. Manually controlling UAVs in the vicinity of obstacles is challenging, however, and poses a high risk of collisions. Even for…
The ability to traverse an unknown environment is crucial for autonomous robot operations. However, due to the limited sensing capabilities and system constraints, approaching this problem with a single robot agent can be slow, costly, and…
Obstacle avoidance for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in cluttered environments is significantly challenging. Existing obstacle avoidance for UAVs either focuses on fully static environments or static environments with only a few dynamic…
Accurate reconstruction of the environment is a central goal of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems. However, the agent's trajectory can significantly affect estimation accuracy. This paper presents a new method to model…
The environment of low-altitude urban airspace is complex and variable due to numerous obstacles, non-cooperative aircrafts, and birds. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) leveraging environmental information to achieve three-dimension…
Search-based motion planning algorithms have been widely utilized for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, deploying these algorithms on real UAVs faces challenges due to limited onboard computational resources. The algorithms struggle…
This paper presents a novel approach for autonomous cooperating UAVs in search and rescue operations in subterranean domains with complex topology. The proposed system was ranked second in the Virtual Track of the DARPA SubT Finals as part…
We propose a robotic learning system for autonomous exploration and navigation in unexplored environments. We are motivated by the idea that even an unseen environment may be familiar from previous experiences in similar environments. The…
This paper concerns SLAM and exploration for a swarm of nano-UAVs. The laser range finder-based tinySLAM algorithm is used to build maps of the environment. The maps are synchronized using an iterative closest point algorithm. The UAVs then…
We consider the problem of autonomous mobile robot exploration in an unknown environment, taking into account a robot's coverage rate, map uncertainty, and state estimation uncertainty. This paper presents a novel exploration framework for…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), equipped with cameras, are employed in numerous applications, including aerial photography, surveillance, and agriculture. In these applications, robust object detection and tracking are essential for the…