Related papers: ViKiNG: Vision-Based Kilometer-Scale Navigation wi…
Reliably planning fingertip grasps for multi-fingered hands lies as a key challenge for many tasks including tool use, insertion, and dexterous in-hand manipulation. This task becomes even more difficult when the robot lacks an accurate…
Mobile robots are often tasked with repeatedly navigating through an environment whose traversability changes over time. These changes may exhibit some hidden structure, which can be learned. Many studies consider reactive algorithms for…
Semantic navigation enables robots to understand their environments beyond basic geometry, allowing them to reason about objects, their functions, and their interrelationships. In semantic robotic navigation, creating accurate and…
Autonomous robotic exploration of unknown and hazardous environments, a long-standing challenge, can be significantly improved by leveraging the advanced reasoning of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). We introduce a novel exploration pipeline…
Mobile ground robots lacking prior knowledge of an environment must rely on sensor data to develop a model of their surroundings. In these scenarios, consistent identification of obstacles and terrain features can be difficult due to noise…
In this paper, we learn visual features that we use to first build a map and then localize a robot driving autonomously across a full day of lighting change, including in the dark. We train a neural network to predict sparse keypoints with…
We present an application of hierarchical Bayesian estimation to robot map building. The revisiting problem occurs when a robot has to decide whether it is seeing a previously-built portion of a map, or is exploring new territory. This is a…
The challenge of navigation in environments with dynamic objects continues to be a central issue in the study of autonomous agents. While predictive methods hold promise, their reliance on precise state information makes them less practical…
It is a challenging task for ground robots to autonomously navigate in harsh environments due to the presence of non-trivial obstacles and uneven terrain. This requires trajectory planning that balances safety and efficiency. The primary…
Inspired by research in psychology, we introduce a behavioral approach for visual navigation using topological maps. Our goal is to enable a robot to navigate from one location to another, relying only on its visual input and the…
Existing work on vision and language navigation mainly relies on navigation-related losses to establish the connection between vision and language modalities, neglecting aspects of helping the navigation agent build a deep understanding of…
This paper highlights the significance of including memory structures in neural networks when the latter are used to learn perception-action loops for autonomous robot navigation. Traditional navigation approaches rely on global maps of the…
Recent Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) advancements are promising, but their idealized assumptions about robot movement and control fail to reflect physically embodied deployment challenges. To bridge this gap, we introduce VLN-PE, a…
This paper describes Motion Planning Networks (MPNet), a computationally efficient, learning-based neural planner for solving motion planning problems. MPNet uses neural networks to learn general near-optimal heuristics for path planning in…
This work focuses on the problem of visual target navigation, which is very important for autonomous robots as it is closely related to high-level tasks. To find a special object in unknown environments, classical and learning-based…
Robot navigation methods allow mobile robots to operate in applications such as warehouses or hospitals. While the environment in which the robot operates imposes requirements on its navigation behavior, most existing methods do not allow…
Recent advances in the field of machine learning have led to new ways for mobile robots to acquire advanced navigational capabilities. However, these learning-based methods raise the possibility that learned navigation behaviors may not…
To perform tasks well in a new domain, one must first know something about it. This paper reports on a robot controller for navigation through unfamiliar indoor worlds. Based on spatial affordances, it integrates planning with reactive…
Obstacle avoidance and path planning are essential for guiding unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) through environments that are densely populated with dynamic obstacles. This paper develops a novel approach that combines tangentbased path…
Safe autonomous navigation is an essential and challenging problem for robots operating in highly unstructured or completely unknown environments. Under these conditions, not only robotic systems must deal with limited localisation…