Related papers: Navigating by Touch: Haptic Monte Carlo Localizati…
State-of-the-art robotic perception systems have achieved sufficiently good performance using Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs), cameras, and nonlinear optimization techniques, that they are now being deployed as technologies. However, many…
Inspired by human behavior when traveling over unknown terrain, this study proposes the use of probing strategies and integrates them into a traversability analysis framework to address safe navigation on unknown rough terrain. Our…
Pedipulation leverages the feet of legged robots for mobile manipulation, eliminating the need for dedicated robotic arms. While previous works have showcased blind and task-specific pedipulation skills, they fail to account for static and…
This extended abstract provides a short introduction on our recently developed perception-based controller for quadrupedal locomotion. Compared to our previous approach based on Visual Foothold Adaptation (VFA) and Model Predictive Control…
Consider a mobile robot tasked with localizing targets at unknown locations by obtaining relative measurements. The observations can be bearing or range measurements. How should the robot move so as to localize the targets and minimize the…
We present a unified model-based and data-driven approach for quadrupedal planning and control to achieve dynamic locomotion over uneven terrain. We utilize on-board proprioceptive and exteroceptive feedback to map sensory information and…
One of the fundamental challenges in realizing the potential of legged robots is generating plans to traverse challenging terrains. Control actions must be carefully selected so the robot will not crash or slip. The high dimensionality of…
Robots that traverse natural terrain must interpret contact forces generated under highly dynamic conditions. However, most terrain characterization approaches rely on quasi-static assumptions that neglect velocity- and…
Perceiving the environment through touch is important for robots to reach in cluttered environments, but devising a way to sense without disturbing objects is challenging. This work presents the design and modelling of whisker-inspired…
Passive deformation due to compliance is a commonly used benefit of soft robots, providing opportunities to achieve robust actuation with few active degrees of freedom. Soft growing robots in particular have shown promise in navigation of…
Robust closed-loop locomotion remains challenging for soft quadruped robots due to high-dimensional dynamics, actuator hysteresis, and difficult-to-model contact interactions, while conventional proprioception provides limited information…
Localization in topological maps is essential for image-based navigation using an RGB camera. Localization using only one camera can be challenging in medium-to-large-sized environments because similar-looking images are often observed…
In this paper, we develop a system for the low-cost indoor localization and tracking problem using radio signal strength indicator, Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), and magnetometer sensors. We develop a novel and simplified probabilistic…
Robotic manipulation, in particular in-hand object manipulation, often requires an accurate estimate of the object's 6D pose. To improve the accuracy of the estimated pose, state-of-the-art approaches in 6D object pose estimation use…
Rising global food demand and harsh working conditions make fruit harvest an important domain to automate. Peduncle localization is an important step for any automated fruit harvesting system, since fruit separation techniques are highly…
Knowing the position of the robot in the world is crucial for navigation. Nowadays, Bayesian filters, such as Kalman and particle-based, are standard approaches in mobile robotics. Recently, end-to-end learning has allowed for scaling-up to…
For certain manipulation tasks, object pose estimation from head-mounted cameras may not be sufficiently accurate. This is at least in part due to our inability to perfectly calibrate the coordinate frames of today's high degree of freedom…
In this paper we propose a novel bipedal locomotion controller that uses noisy exteroception to traverse a wide variety of terrains. Building on the cutting-edge advancements in attention based belief encoding for quadrupedal locomotion,…
Can a robot grasp an unknown object without seeing it? In this paper, we present a tactile-sensing based approach to this challenging problem of grasping novel objects without prior knowledge of their location or physical properties. Our…
Localization in challenging, natural environments such as forests or woodlands is an important capability for many applications from guiding a robot navigating along a forest trail to monitoring vegetation growth with handheld sensors. In…