Related papers: Self-Reflective Terrain-Aware Robot Adaptation for…
Planetary exploration missions require robots capable of navigating extreme and unknown environments. While wheeled rovers have dominated past missions, their mobility is limited to traversable surfaces. Legged robots, especially…
Muddy terrains present significant challenges for terrestrial robots, as subtle changes in composition and water content can lead to large variations in substrate strength and force responses, causing the robot to slip or get stuck. This…
Mobile robots, especially those driving outdoors and in unstructured terrain, sometimes suffer from failures and errors in locomotion, like unevenly pressurized or flat tires, loose axes or de-tracked tracks. Those are errors that go…
Autonomous wheeled-legged robots have the potential to transform logistics systems, improving operational efficiency and adaptability in urban environments. Navigating urban environments, however, poses unique challenges for robots,…
In order for cooperative robots ("co-robots") to respond to human behaviors accurately and efficiently in human-robot collaboration, interpretation of human actions, awareness of new situations, and appropriate decision making are all…
We present a method for solving the coverage problem with the objective of autonomously exploring an unknown environment under mission time constraints. Here, the robot is tasked with planning a path over a horizon such that the accumulated…
Navigating off-road with a fast autonomous vehicle depends on a robust perception system that differentiates traversable from non-traversable terrain. Typically, this depends on a semantic understanding which is based on supervised learning…
Outdoor intelligent autonomous robotic operation relies on a sufficiently expressive map of the environment. Classical geometric mapping methods retain essential structural environment information, but lack a semantic understanding and…
The ability to achieve precise and smooth trajectory tracking is crucial for ensuring the successful execution of various tasks involving robotic manipulators. State-of-the-art techniques require accurate mathematical models of the robot…
The recently emerging research area in robotics, ground view change detection, suffers from its ill-posed-ness because of visual uncertainty combined with complex nonlinear perspective projection. To regularize the ill-posed-ness, the…
We describe a framework for changing-contact robot manipulation tasks that require the robot to make and break contacts with objects and surfaces. The discontinuous interaction dynamics of such tasks make it difficult to construct and use a…
Dynamic locomotion of legged robots is a critical yet challenging topic in expanding the operational range of mobile robots. It requires precise planning when possible footholds are sparse, robustness against uncertainties and disturbances,…
Contemporary robots have become exceptionally skilled at achieving specific tasks in structured environments. However, they often fail when faced with the limitless permutations of real-world unstructured environments. This motivates…
Bio-inspired walking hexapod robots are a relatively young branch in robotics in both state of the art and applications. Despite their high degree of flexibility and adaptability derived by their redundant design, the research field that…
It is necessary for a mobile robot to be able to efficiently plan a path from its starting, or current, location to a desired goal location. This is a trivial task when the environment is static. However, the operational environment of the…
Most autonomous navigation systems assume wheeled robots are rigid bodies and their 2D planar workspaces can be divided into free spaces and obstacles. However, recent wheeled mobility research, showing that wheeled platforms have the…
Traversing risky terrains with sparse footholds presents significant challenges for legged robots, requiring precise foot placement in safe areas. To acquire comprehensive exteroceptive information, prior studies have employed motion…
For robots to navigate safely and efficiently on soft, granular terrains, it is crucial to gather information about the terrain's mechanical properties, which directly affect locomotion performance. Recent research has developed robotic…
Climate change is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century, and many in the robotics community are looking for ways to contribute. This paper presents a roadmap for climate-relevant robotics research, identifying high-impact…
Robots operating in the real world will experience a range of different environments and tasks. It is essential for the robot to have the ability to adapt to its surroundings to work efficiently in changing conditions. Evolutionary robotics…