Related papers: Flexible Supervised Autonomy for Exploration in Su…
With the real need of field exploration in large-scale and extreme outdoor environments, cooperative exploration tasks have garnered increasing attention. This paper presents a comprehensive review of multi-robot cooperative exploration…
Fleets of autonomous robots have been deployed for exploration of unknown scenes for features of interest, e.g., subterranean exploration, reconnaissance, search and rescue missions. During exploration, the robots may encounter…
We present a field report of CTU-CRAS-NORLAB team from the Subterranean Challenge (SubT) organised by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The contest seeks to advance technologies that would improve the safety and…
This paper develops a communication-efficient distributed mapping approach for rapid exploration of a cave by a multi-robot team. Subsurface planetary exploration is an unsolved problem challenged by communication, power, and compute…
Autonomous exploration of unknown space is an essential component for the deployment of mobile robots in the real world. Safe navigation is crucial for all robotics applications and requires accurate and consistent maps of the robot's…
We propose a framework for resilient autonomous navigation in perceptually challenging unknown environments with mobility-stressing elements such as uneven surfaces with rocks and boulders, steep slopes, negative obstacles like cliffs and…
Robots will bring search and rescue (SaR) in disaster response to another level, in case they can autonomously take over dangerous SaR tasks from humans. A main challenge for autonomous SaR robots is to safely navigate in cluttered…
As robotic agents increasingly assist humans in reality, quadruped robots offer unique opportunities for interaction in complex scenarios due to their agile movement. However, building agents that can autonomously navigate, adapt, and…
This paper presents a novel strategy for autonomous teamed exploration of subterranean environments using legged and aerial robots. Tailored to the fact that subterranean settings, such as cave networks and underground mines, often involve…
Autonomous exploration is a fundamental capability that tightly integrates perception, planning, control, and motion execution. It plays a critical role in a wide range of applications, including indoor target search, mapping of extreme…
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…
Search and rescue with a team of heterogeneous mobile robots in unknown and large-scale underground environments requires high-precision localization and mapping. This crucial requirement is faced with many challenges in complex and…
To extend the limited scope of autonomy used in prior missions for operation in distant and complex environments, there is a need to further develop and mature autonomy that jointly reasons over multiple subsystems, which we term…
Autonomous robots have real-world applications in diverse fields, such as mobile manipulation and environmental exploration, and many such tasks benefit from a hands-off approach in terms of human user involvement over a long task horizon.…
Enabling robots to autonomously navigate unknown, complex, and dynamic real-world environments presents several challenges, including imperfect perception, partial observability, localization uncertainty, and safety constraints. Current…
Planetary exploration missions require robots capable of navigating extreme and unknown environments. While wheeled rovers have dominated past missions, their mobility is limited to traversable surfaces. Legged robots, especially…
One of the most challenging tasks for a flying robot is to autonomously navigate between target locations quickly and reliably while avoiding obstacles in its path, and with little to no a-priori knowledge of the operating environment. This…
Robots need robust and flexible vision systems to perceive and reason about their environments beyond geometry. Most of such systems build upon deep learning approaches. As autonomous robots are commonly deployed in initially unknown…
The DARPA Subterranean Challenge was designed for competitors to develop and deploy teams of autonomous robots to explore difficult unknown underground environments. Categorised in to human-made tunnels, underground urban infrastructure and…
A flexible topological representation consisting of a two-layer graph structure built on-board an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) by continuously filling the free space of an occupancy map with intersecting spheres is proposed in this…