Related papers: Flying Guide Dog: Walkable Path Discovery for the …
Blind people have limited opportunities to explore an environment based on their interests. While existing navigation systems could provide them with surrounding information while navigating, they have limited scalability as they require…
In this paper, we address the problem of adaptive path planning for accurate semantic segmentation of terrain using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The usage of UAVs for terrain monitoring and remote sensing is rapidly gaining momentum due…
Perceptive locomotion for legged robots requires anticipating and adapting to complex, dynamic environments. Model Predictive Control (MPC) serves as a strong baseline, providing interpretable motion planning with constraint enforcement,…
Assistive robotics is an important subarea of robotics that focuses on the well-being of people with disabilities. A robotic guide dog is an assistive quadruped robot that helps visually impaired people in obstacle avoidance and navigation.…
The growing demand for intelligent environments unleashes an extraordinary cycle of privacy-aware applications that makes individuals' life more comfortable and safe. Examples of these applications include pedestrian tracking systems in…
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…
Navigating dynamic environments requires the robot to generate collision-free trajectories and actively avoid moving obstacles. Most previous works designed path planning algorithms based on one single map representation, such as the…
Vision-language models (VLMs) have become a promising approach to enhancing perception and decision-making in autonomous driving. The gap remains in applying VLMs to understand complex scenarios interacting with pedestrians and efficient…
Classic computer vision algorithms, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation can not provide a holistic understanding of the surroundings for the visually impaired. In this paper, we utilize panoptic segmentation to assist the…
This paper presents a framework to navigate visually impaired people through unfamiliar environments by means of a mobile manipulator. The Human-Robot system consists of three key components: a mobile base, a robotic arm, and the human…
Birds-eye-view (BEV) semantic segmentation is critical for autonomous driving for its powerful spatial representation ability. It is challenging to estimate the BEV semantic maps from monocular images due to the spatial gap, since it is…
Just like in humans vision plays a fundamental role in guiding adaptive locomotion, when designing the control strategy for a walking assistive technology, Computer Vision may bring substantial improvements when performing an…
Natural environments such as forests and grasslands are challenging for robotic navigation because of the false perception of rigid obstacles from high grass, twigs, or bushes. In this work, we propose Wild Visual Navigation (WVN), an…
Bird's-eye-view (BEV) images have been widely demonstrated to provide valuable prior information for navigation. Given the global information provided by such views, two key challenges remain: how to fully exploit this information and how…
A guiding robot aims to effectively bring people to and from specific places within environments that are possibly unknown to them. During this operation the robot should be able to detect and track the accompanied person, trying never to…
This paper presents a novel information-based mission planner for a drone tasked to monitor a spatially distributed dynamical phenomenon. For the sake of simplicity, the area to be monitored is discretized. The insight behind the proposed…
In this study, we introduce AV-PedAware, a self-supervised audio-visual fusion system designed to improve dynamic pedestrian awareness for robotics applications. Pedestrian awareness is a critical requirement in many robotics applications.…
Some animals exhibit multi-modal locomotion capability to traverse a wide range of terrains and environments, such as amphibians that can swim and walk or birds that can fly and walk. This capability is extremely beneficial for expanding…
We consider the problem of navigating a mobile robot towards a target in an unknown environment that is endowed with visual sensors, where neither the robot nor the sensors have access to global positioning information and only use…
Efficient data collection methods play a major role in helping us better understand the Earth and its ecosystems. In many applications, the usage of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for monitoring and remote sensing is rapidly gaining…