Related papers: Finding and Following Optimal Trajectories for an …
Safe navigation in cluttered environments is an important challenge for autonomous systems. Robots navigating through obstacle ridden scenarios need to be able to navigate safely in the presence of obstacles, goals, and ego objects of…
Due to sensor limitations, environments that off-road mobile robots operate in are often only partially observable. As the robots move throughout the environment and towards their goal, the optimal route is continuously revised as the…
With increasing numbers of mobile robots arriving in real-world applications, more robots coexist in the same space, interact, and possibly collaborate. Methods to provide such systems with system size scalability are known, for example,…
The space environment around the Earth is becoming increasingly populated by both active spacecraft and space debris. To avoid potential collision events, significant improvements in Space Situational Awareness (SSA) activities and…
Aerial autonomous machines (Drones) has a plethora of promising applications and use cases. While the popularity of these autonomous machines continues to grow, there are many challenges, such as endurance and agility, that could hinder the…
Practical deployments of coordinated fleets of mobile robots in different environments have revealed the benefits of maintaining small distances between robots, especially as they move at higher speeds. However, this is counter-intuitive in…
A computational system is called autonomous if it is able to make its own decisions, or take its own actions, without human supervision or control. The capability and spread of such systems have reached the point where they are beginning to…
Long-term autonomy of robotic systems implicitly requires dependable platforms that are able to naturally handle hardware and software faults, problems in behaviors, or lack of knowledge. Model-based dependable platforms additionally…
Model predictive control (MPC) has shown great success for controlling complex systems such as legged robots. However, when closing the loop, the performance and feasibility of the finite horizon optimal control problem (OCP) solved at each…
The autonomous operation of flexible-wing aircraft is technically challenging and has never been presented within literature. The lack of an exact modeling framework is due to the complex nonlinear aerodynamic relationships governed by the…
Modular robots offer reconfigurability and fault tolerance essential for lunar missions, but require controllers that adapt safely to real-world disturbances. We build on our previous hardware-agnostic actuator synchronization in Motion…
This paper focuses on the development of a ground-based test-bed to analyze the complexities of contact dynamics between multibody systems in space. The test-bed consists of an air-bearing platform equipped with a 7 degrees-of-freedom (one…
Robot navigation in crowded public spaces is a complex task that requires addressing a variety of engineering and human factors challenges. These challenges have motivated a great amount of research resulting in important developments for…
While the capabilities of autonomous systems have been steadily improving in recent years, these systems still struggle to rapidly explore previously unknown environments without the aid of GPS-assisted navigation. The DARPA Subterranean…
Over the past decades, progress in deployable autonomous flight systems has slowly stagnated. This is reflected in today's production air-crafts, where pilots only enable simple physics-based systems such as autopilot for takeoff, landing,…
In recent years, impressive results have been achieved in robotic manipulation. While many efforts focus on generating collision-free reference signals, few allow safe contact between the robot bodies and the environment. However, in…
High speed navigation through unknown environments is a challenging problem in robotics. It requires fast computation and tight integration of all the subsystems on the robot such that the latency in the perception-action loop is as small…
Currently, industrial sectors are transforming their business processes into e-services and component-based architectures to build flexible, robust, and scalable systems, and reduce integration-related maintenance and development costs.…
In practical applications, the unpredictable movement of obstacles and the imprecise state observation of robots introduce significant uncertainties for the swarm of robots, especially in cluster environments. However, existing methods are…
In the event of a total loss of thrust, a pilot must identify a reachable landing site and subsequently execute a forced landing. To do so, they must estimate which region on the ground can be reached safely in gliding flight. We call this…