Related papers: AquaVis: A Perception-Aware Autonomous Navigation …

Mapless navigation has emerged as a promising approach for enabling autonomous robots to navigate in environments where pre-existing maps may be inaccurate, outdated, or unavailable. In this work, we propose an image-based local…

The increasing demand for underwater vehicles highlights the necessity for robust localization solutions in inspection missions. In this work, we present a novel real-time sonar-based underwater global positioning algorithm for AUVs…

We propose the notion of Attention-Aware Visualizations (AAVs) that track the user's perception of a visual representation over time and feed this information back to the visualization. Such context awareness is particularly useful for…

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) have the ability to operate in harsh underwater environments without endangering human lives in the process. Nevertheless, just like their ground and aerial counterparts, AUVs need to be able to…

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are being tasked with increasingly complex missions. The acoustic communications required for AUVs are, by the nature of the medium, low bandwidth while adverse environmental conditions underwater often…

This paper addresses real-time dense 3D reconstruction for a resource-constrained Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). Underwater vision-guided operations are among the most challenging as they combine 3D motion in the presence of external…

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) have become the de facto vehicle for remote operations involving oceanography, inspection, and monitoring tasks. These vehicles operate in different and often challenging environments; hence, the design…

Underwater video analysis is particularly challenging due to factors such as low lighting, color distortion, and turbidity, which compromise visual data quality and directly impact the performance of perception modules in robotic…

In the maritime sector, safe vessel navigation is of great importance, particularly in congested harbors and waterways. The focus of this work is to estimate the distance between an object of interest and potential obstacles using a…

Autonomous driving on water surfaces plays an essential role in executing hazardous and time-consuming missions, such as maritime surveillance, survivors rescue, environmental monitoring, hydrography mapping and waste cleaning. This work…

Object detection in state-of-the-art Autonomous Vehicles (AV) framework relies heavily on deep neural networks. Typically, these networks perform object detection uniformly on the entire camera LiDAR frames. However, this uniformity…

This paper reports on the development, execution, and open-sourcing of a new robotics course at MIT. The course is a modern take on "Visual Navigation for Autonomous Vehicles" (VNAV) and targets first-year graduate students and senior…

Most applications in autonomous navigation using mounted cameras rely on the construction and processing of geometric 3D point clouds, which is an expensive process. However, there is another simpler way to make a space navigable quickly:…

Tunnel construction using the drill-and-blast method requires the 3D measurement of the excavation front to evaluate underbreak locations. Considering the inspection and measurement task's safety, cost, and efficiency, deploying lightweight…

Assistive visual navigation systems for visually impaired individuals have become increasingly popular thanks to the rise of mobile computing. Most of these devices work by translating visual information into voice commands. In complex…

Segmentation of objects in a video is challenging due to the nuances such as motion blurring, parallax, occlusions, changes in illumination, etc. Instead of addressing these nuances separately, we focus on building a generalizable solution…

This paper presents a two-layer control framework for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) designed to handle uncertain nonlinear dynamics, including the mass matrix, previously assumed known. Unlike prior studies, this approach makes the…

Project AutoVision aims to develop localization and 3D scene perception capabilities for a self-driving vehicle. Such capabilities will enable autonomous navigation in urban and rural environments, in day and night, and with cameras as the…

In-situ visual observations of marine organisms is crucial to developing behavioural understandings and their relations to their surrounding ecosystem. Typically, these observations are collected via divers, tags, and remotely-operated or…

The transport industry has recently shown significant interest in unmanned surface vehicles (USVs), specifically for port and inland waterway transport. These systems can improve operational efficiency and safety, which is especially…