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Accurate extrinsic sensor calibration is essential for both autonomous vehicles and robots. Traditionally this is an involved process requiring calibration targets, known fiducial markers and is generally performed in a lab. Moreover, even…
Efficient mobility and power consumption are critical for autonomous water surface robots in long-term water environmental monitoring. This study develops and evaluates a transformable mobility mechanism for a water surface robot with two…
Exploration of Mars has been made possible using a series of landers, rovers and orbiters. The HiRise camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has captured high-resolution images covering large tracts of the surface. However, orbital…
Purpose of review: This paper reviews opportunities and challenges for decentralised control, change-detection, and learning in the context of resilient robot teams. Recent findings: Exogenous fault detection methods can provide a generic…
This paper describes the design and control of a support and recovery system for use with planar legged robots. The system operates in three modes. First, it can be operated in a fully transparent mode where no forces are applied to the…
LiDAR-based localization is valuable for applications like mining surveys and underground facility maintenance. However, existing methods can struggle when dealing with uninformative geometric structures in challenging scenarios. This paper…
Our brain has an inner global positioning system which enables us to sense and navigate 3D spaces in real time. Can mobile robots replicate such a biological feat in a dynamic environment? We introduce the first spatial reasoning framework…
Modular Aerial Robot Systems (MARS) consist of multiple drone modules that are physically bound together to form a single structure for flight. Exploiting structural redundancy, MARS can be reconfigured into different formations to mitigate…
This paper addresses the fast replanning problem in dynamic environments with moving obstacles. Since for randomly moving obstacles the future states are unpredictable, the proposed method, called SMARRT, reacts to obstacle motions and…
We present a modular robotic system for autonomous exploration and semantic updating of large-scale unknown environments. Our approach enables a mobile robot to build, revisit, and update a hybrid semantic map that integrates a 2D occupancy…
Mobile manipulation tasks are one of the key challenges in the field of search and rescue (SAR) robotics requiring robots with flexible locomotion and manipulation abilities. Since the tasks are mostly unknown in advance, the robot has to…
Analysis of sediments from rivers, lakes, reservoirs, wetlands and other constructed surface water impoundments is an important tool to characterize the function and health of these systems, but is generally carried out manually. This is…
Developing soft robots that can control their own life-cycle and degrade on-demand while maintaining hyper-elasticity is a significant research challenge. On-demand degradable soft robots, which conserve their original functionality during…
To maintain full autonomy, autonomous robotic systems must have the ability to self-repair. Self-repairing via compensatory mechanisms appears in nature: for example, some fish can lose even 76% of their propulsive surface without loss of…
We consider the problem of building an assistive robotic system that can help humans in daily household cleanup tasks. Creating such an autonomous system in real-world environments is inherently quite challenging, as a general solution may…
Marine biofouling on vessel hulls poses major ecological, economic, and biosecurity risks. Traditional survey methods rely on diver inspections, which are hazardous and limited in scalability. This work investigates automated classification…
Classical snake robot control leverages mimicking snake-like gaits tuned for specific environments. However, to operate adaptively in unstructured environments, gait generation must be dynamically scheduled. In this work, we present a…
The high probability of hardware failures prevents many advanced robots (e.g., legged robots) from being confidently deployed in real-world situations (e.g., post-disaster rescue). Instead of attempting to diagnose the failures, robots…
This work studies rearrangement problems involving the sorting of robots or objects in stack-like containers, which can be accessed only from one side. Two scenarios are considered: one where every robot or object needs to reach a…
This paper presents a vision guidance and control method for autonomous robotic capture and stabilization of orbital objects in a time-critical manner. The method takes into account various operational and physical constraints, including…