Related papers: SC-Explorer: Incremental 3D Scene Completion for S…
Efficient coverage of unknown environments requires robots to adapt their paths in real time based on on-board sensor data. In this paper, we introduce CAP, a connectivity-aware hierarchical coverage path planning algorithm for efficient…
Although ground robotic autonomy has gained widespread usage in structured and controlled environments, autonomy in unknown and off-road terrain remains a difficult problem. Extreme, off-road, and unstructured environments such as…
Panoramic RGB-D cameras are known for their ability to produce high quality 3D scene reconstructions. However, operating these cameras involves manually selecting viewpoints and physically transporting the camera, making the generation of a…
While 2D occupancy maps commonly used in mobile robotics enable safe navigation in indoor environments, in order for robots to understand and interact with their environment and its inhabitants representing 3D geometry and semantic…
Planetary exploration robots must navigate uneven terrain while building reliable maps for space missions. However, most existing methods incorporate traversability constraints but may not handle high uncertainty in elevation estimates near…
Informative path planning algorithms are of paramount importance in applications like disaster management to efficiently gather information through a priori unknown environments. This is, however, a complex problem that involves finding a…
We propose a robotic learning system for autonomous exploration and navigation in unexplored environments. We are motivated by the idea that even an unseen environment may be familiar from previous experiences in similar environments. The…
Autonomous exploration in unknown environments remains a fundamental challenge in robotics, particularly for applications such as search and rescue, industrial inspection, and planetary exploration. Multi-robot active SLAM presents a…
Safely exploring environments with a-priori unknown constraints is a fundamental challenge that restricts the autonomy of robots. While safety is paramount, guarantees on sufficient exploration are also crucial for ensuring autonomous task…
Modern intelligent and autonomous robotic applications often require robots to have more information about their environment than that provided by traditional occupancy grid maps. For example, a robot tasked to perform autonomous semantic…
Motion planning is a critical component of intelligent unmanned systems, enabling their complex autonomous operations. However, current planning algorithms still face limitations in planning efficiency due to inflexible strategies and weak…
Mainstream autonomous exploration methods usually perform excessively-repeated explorations for the same region, leading to long exploration time and exploration trajectory in complex scenes. To handle this issue, we propose a novel…
We propose a novel holistic approach for safe autonomous exploration and map building based on constrained Bayesian optimisation. This method finds optimal continuous paths instead of discrete sensing locations that inherently satisfy…
Indoor exploration is an important task in disaster relief, emergency response scenarios, and Search And Rescue (SAR) missions. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) systems can aid first responders by maneuvering autonomously in areas inside…
The ability to plan informative paths online is essential to robot autonomy. In particular, sampling-based approaches are often used as they are capable of using arbitrary information gain formulations. However, they are prone to local…
In large unknown environments, search operations can be much more time-efficient with the use of multi-robot fleets by parallelizing efforts. This means robots must efficiently perform collaborative mapping (exploration) while…
In this article, we propose a novel navigation framework that leverages a two layered graph representation of the environment for efficient large-scale exploration, while it integrates a novel uncertainty awareness scheme to handle dynamic…
In recent years, advancements have been made towards the goal of using chaotic coverage path planners for autonomous search and traversal of spaces with limited environmental cues. However, the state of this field is still in its infancy as…
Holistic scene understanding poses a fundamental contribution to the autonomous operation of a robotic agent in its environment. Key ingredients include a well-defined representation of the surroundings to capture its spatial structure as…
This report overviews a set of recent contributions in the field of path planning that were developed to enable the realization of the autonomous aerial robotic worker for inspection operations. The specific algorithmic contributions…