Related papers: Environmental Sensing Options for Robot Teams: A C…

For a robot to act intelligently, it needs to sense the world around it. Increasingly, robots build an internal representation of the world from sensor readings. This representation can then be used to inform downstream tasks, such as…

Scientists rely on simulations to study natural phenomena. Trusting the simulation results is vital to develop sciences in any field. One approach to build trust is to ensure the reproducibility and traceability of the simulations through…

Collecting training data from the physical world is usually time-consuming and even dangerous for fragile robots, and thus, recent advances in robot learning advocate the use of simulators as the training platform. Unfortunately, the…

Identifying and categorizing specific robot tasks, behaviors, and resources is an essential precursor to reproducing and evaluating robotics experiments across laboratories and platforms. Without some means of capturing how one environment,…

One common and desirable application of robots is exploring potentially hazardous and unstructured environments. Air-ground collaboration offers a synergistic approach to addressing such exploration challenges. In this paper, we demonstrate…

The emerging behaviors of swarms have fascinated scientists and gathered significant interest in the field of robotics. Traditionally, swarms are viewed as egalitarian, with robots sharing identical roles and capabilities. However, recent…

The deployment of autonomous service robots in human-centric environments is hindered by a critical gap in perception and planning. Traditional navigation systems rely on expensive LiDARs that, while geometrically precise, are semantically…

Purpose of Review: The field of humanoid robotics, perception plays a fundamental role in enabling robots to interact seamlessly with humans and their surroundings, leading to improved safety, efficiency, and user experience. This…

When studying robots collaborating with humans, much of the focus has been on robot policies that coordinate fluently with human teammates in collaborative tasks. However, less emphasis has been placed on the effect of the environment on…

The visual world is very rich and generally too complex to perceive in its entirety. Yet only certain features are typically required to adequately perform some task in a given situation. Rather than hardwire-in decisions about when and…

Path planning for multiple robots is well studied in the AI and robotics communities. For a given discretized environment, robots need to find collision-free paths to a set of specified goal locations. Robots can be fully anonymous,…

Heterogeneous multi-robot systems are advantageous for operations in unknown environments because functionally specialised robots can gather environmental information, while others perform tasks. We define this decomposition as the…

As both legged robots and embedded compute have become more capable, researchers have started to focus on field deployment of these robots. Robust autonomy in unstructured environments requires perception of the world around the robot in…

We address the challenging problem of robotic grasping and manipulation in the presence of uncertainty. This uncertainty is due to noisy sensing, inaccurate models and hard-to-predict environment dynamics. We quantify the importance of…

Robotic systems are becoming pervasive and adopted in increasingly many domains, such as manufacturing, healthcare, and space exploration. To this end, engineering software has emerged as a crucial discipline for building maintainable and…

We consider the human-aware task planning problem where a human-robot team is given a shared task with a known objective to achieve. Recent approaches tackle it by modeling it as a team of independent, rational agents, where the robot plans…

Perception tasks play a crucial role in the development of automated operations and systems across multiple application fields. In the railway transportation domain, these tasks can improve the safety, reliability, and efficiency of various…

Many manipulation tasks require the robot to control the contact between a grasped compliant tool and the environment, e.g. scraping a frying pan with a spatula. However, modeling tool-environment interaction is difficult, especially when…

Field robotics applications, such as search and rescue, involve robots operating in large, unknown areas. These environments present unique challenges that compound the difficulties faced by a robot operator. The use of multi-robot teams,…

Motion planning for robotic manipulators relies on precise knowledge of the environment in order to be able to define restricted areas and to take collision objects into account. To capture the workspace, point clouds of the environment are…