Related papers: Robotic Testbed for Rendezvous and Optical Navigat…
Recent studies in Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) train RL agents to execute natural-language navigation instructions in photorealistic environments, as a step towards robots that can follow human instructions. However, given the…
Recent interest in on-orbit servicing and Active Debris Removal (ADR) missions have driven the need for technologies to enable non-cooperative rendezvous manoeuvres. Such manoeuvres put heavy burden on the perception capabilities of a…
Visual Odometry (VO) accumulates a positional drift in long-term robot navigation tasks. Although Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) improve VO in various aspects, VO still suffers from moving obstacles, discontinuous observation of…
Accurate 6D object pose estimation is fundamental to robotic manipulation and grasping. Previous methods follow a local optimization approach which minimizes the distance between closest point pairs to handle the rotation ambiguity of…
Safe and high-speed navigation is a key enabling capability for real world deployment of robotic systems. A significant limitation of existing approaches is the computational bottleneck associated with explicit mapping and the limited field…
Drones may be more advantageous than fixed cameras for quality control applications in industrial facilities, since they can be redeployed dynamically and adjusted to production planning. The practical scenario that has motivated this…
This article presents an innovative study in exploring, evaluating, and implementing deep learning architectures for the calibration of multi-modal sensor systems. The focus behind this is to leverage the use of sensor fusion to achieve…
Autonomous Rendezvous and Docking (RVD) have been extensively studied in recent years, addressing the stringent requirements of spacecraft dynamics variations and the limitations of GNC systems. This paper presents an innovative approach…
Autonomous robots require change-robust spatial-semantic reasoning: using spatial and semantic knowledge to decide where to go, how to get there, and where the robot is despite environmental change. Existing approaches typically attach…
Stable and accurate tracking is essential for marine robotics, yet Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals vanish immediately below the sea surface. Traditional alternatives suffer from error accumulation, high computational…
Visual navigation requires the robot to reach a specified goal such as an image, based on a sequence of first-person visual observations. While recent learning-based approaches have made significant progress, they often focus on improving…
As the density of spacecraft in Earth's orbit increases, their recognition, pose and trajectory identification becomes crucial for averting potential collisions and executing debris removal operations. However, training models able to…
Drone-based beam measurements are a promising avenue to tackle the critical challenge of calibration for 21 cm cosmology telescopes. In this paper, we introduce a new drone-based calibration system for 400-800 MHz radio observatories,…
Spacecraft autonomy can be enhanced by vision-based navigation (VBN) techniques. Applications range from manoeuvers around Solar System objects and landing on planetary surfaces, to in-orbit servicing or space debris removal. The…
Robots often use feature-based image tracking to identify their position in their surrounding environment; however, feature-based image tracking is prone to errors in low-textured and poorly lit environments. Specifically, we investigate a…
Visual Place Recognition (VPR) has been a subject of significant research over the last 15 to 20 years. VPR is a fundamental task for autonomous navigation as it enables self-localization within an environment. Although robots are often…
Coordinated multi-robot navigation is an essential ability for a team of robots operating in diverse environments. Robot teams often need to maintain specific formations, such as wedge formations, to enhance visibility, positioning, and…
Remote VR teleoperation with supernumerary robotic limbs enables distant users to operate in another's local space. While a shared first-person view aids hand-eye coordination, locking the guest's camera to the host's head can degrade…
The creation of precise and high-resolution crop point clouds in agricultural fields has become a key challenge for high-throughput phenotyping applications. This work implements a novel calibration method to calibrate the laser scanning…
Robots need the capability of placing objects in arbitrary, specific poses to rearrange the world and achieve various valuable tasks. Object reorientation plays a crucial role in this as objects may not initially be oriented such that the…