Related papers: Reconfigurable Robots for Scaling Reef Restoration
Research on coastal regions traditionally involves methods like manual sampling, monitoring buoys, and remote sensing, but these methods face challenges in spatially and temporally diverse regions of interest. Autonomous surface vehicles…
Safety concerns during the operation of legged robots must be addressed to enable their widespread use. Machine learning-based control methods that use model-based constraints provide promising means to improve robot safety. This study…
This paper focuses on coordinating a robot swarm orbiting a convex path without collisions among the individuals. The individual robots lack braking capabilities and can only adjust their courses while maintaining their constant but…
Centipede-like robots offer an effective and robust solution to navigation over complex terrain with minimal sensing. However, when climbing over obstacles, such multi-legged robots often elevate their center-of-mass into unstable…
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,…
Although wheeled robots have been predominant for planetary exploration, their geometry limits their capabilities when traveling over steep slopes, through rocky terrains, and in microgravity. Legged robots equipped with grippers are a…
Legged rovers provide enhanced mobility compared to wheeled platforms, enabling navigation on steep and irregular planetary terrains. However, traditional legged locomotion might be energetically inefficient and potentially dangerous to the…
Marine oil spills damage ecosystems, contaminate coastlines, and disrupt food webs, while imposing substantial economic losses on fisheries and coastal communities. Prior work has demonstrated the feasibility of containing and cleaning…
Automatic fall recovery is a crucial prerequisite before humanoid robots can be reliably deployed. Hand-designing controllers for getting up is difficult because of the varied configurations a humanoid can end up in after a fall and the…
Coral reefs, crucial for sustaining marine biodiversity and ecological processes (e.g., nutrient cycling, habitat provision), face escalating threats, underscoring the need for efficient monitoring. Coral reef ecological monitoring faces…
Underwater robot interventions require a high level of safety and reliability. A major challenge to address is a robust and accurate acquisition of localization estimates, as it is a prerequisite to enable more complex tasks, e.g. floating…
Positioning of underwater robots in confined and cluttered spaces remains a key challenge for field operations. Existing systems are mostly designed for large, open-water environments and struggle in industrial settings due to poor…
The Coastal underwater evidence search system with surface-underwater collaboration is designed to revolutionize the search for artificial objects in coastal underwater environments, overcoming limitations associated with traditional…
Conventional formation methods typically rely on fixed hierarchical structures, such as predetermined leaders or predefined formation shapes. These rigid hierarchies can render formations cumbersome and inflexible in complex environments,…
In this paper we tackle a problem of optimal design and location of Tuned Mass Dampers (TMDs) for structures subjected to earthquake ground motions, using a novel meta-heuristic algorithm. Specifically, the Coral Reefs Optimization (CRO)…
The coordination of robot swarms - large decentralized teams of robots - generally relies on robust and efficient inter-robot communication. Maintaining communication between robots is particularly challenging in field deployments.…
The ability to efficiently and effectively explore planetary surfaces is currently limited by the capability of wheeled rovers to traverse challenging terrains, and by pre-programmed data acquisition plans with limited in-situ flexibility.…
This investigation introduces a novel deep reinforcement learning-based suite to control floating platforms in both simulated and real-world environments. Floating platforms serve as versatile test-beds to emulate micro-gravity environments…
Warming oceans due to climate change are leading to increased numbers of ectoparasitic copepods, also known as sea lice, which can cause significant ecological loss to wild salmon populations and major economic loss to aquaculture sites.…
Deploying self-navigating surface vessels in inland waterways offers a sustainable alternative to reduce road traffic congestion and emissions. However, navigating confined waterways presents unique challenges, including narrow channels,…