Related papers: The ReSWARM Microgravity Flight Experiments: Plann…
Fully re-orientable small spacecraft are now supported by commercial technologies, allowing them to point their instruments in any direction and capture images, with short notice. When combined with improved onboard processing, and…
Our Robust, Explainable Autonomy for Scientific Icy Moon Operations (REASIMO) effort contributes to NASA's Concepts for Ocean worlds Life Detection Technology (COLDTech) program, which explores science platform technologies for ocean worlds…
Imagine a robot that can assemble a functional product from the individual parts presented in any configuration to the robot. Designing such a robotic system is a complex problem which presents several open challenges. To bypass these…
Research in soft manipulators has significantly enhanced object grasping capabilities, thanks to their adaptability to various shapes and sizes. Applying this technology to on-orbit servicing, especially during the capture and containment…
Recent progress in robot autonomy and safety has significantly improved human-robot interactions, enabling robots to work alongside humans on various tasks. However, complex assembly tasks still present significant challenges due to…
Assistive free-flyer robots autonomously caring for future crewed outposts -- such as NASA's Astrobee robots on the International Space Station (ISS) -- must be able to detect day-to-day interior changes to track inventory, detect and…
We present SpaceAgents-1, a system for learning human and multi-robot collaboration (HMRC) strategies under microgravity conditions. Future space exploration requires humans to work together with robots. However, acquiring proficient robot…
The next generation of spacecraft is anticipated to enable various new applications involving onboard processing, machine learning and decentralised operational scenarios. Even though many of these have been previously proposed and…
We introduce a system for real-time sperm whale rendezvous at sea using an autonomous uncrewed aerial vehicle. Our system employs model-based reinforcement learning that combines in situ sensor data with an empirical whale dive model to…
Ensuring safety for spacecraft operations has become a paramount concern due to the proliferation of space debris and the saturation of valuable orbital regimes. In this regard, the Collision Avoidance Manoeuvre (CAM) has emerged as a…
The distribution of close-in exoplanets is shaped by a complex interplay between atmospheric and dynamical processes. The Desert-Rim Exoplanets Atmosphere and Migration (DREAM) program aims at disentangling those processes through the study…
The vast majority of existing Distributed Computing literature about mobile robotic swarms considers computability issues: characterizing the set of system hypotheses that enables problem solvability. By contrast, the focus of this work is…
Efficient planning of assembly motions is a long standing challenge in the field of robotics that has been primarily tackled with reinforcement learning and sampling-based methods by using extensive physics simulations. This paper proposes…
Industrial robots typically require very structured and predictable working environments, and explicit programming, in order to perform well. Therefore, expensive and time-consuming engineering work is a major obstruction when mediating…
To solve multi-step manipulation tasks in the real world, an autonomous robot must take actions to observe its environment and react to unexpected observations. This may require opening a drawer to observe its contents or moving an object…
This paper presents a real-time trajectory planning scheme for a heterogeneous multi-robot system (consisting of a quadrotor and a ground mobile robot) for a cooperative landing task, where the landing position, landing time, and…
Robot arms with lighter weight can reduce unnecessary energy consumption which is desirable in robotic industry. However, lightweight arms undergo undesirable elastic deformation. In this paper, the planar motion of a lightweight flexible…
In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a robust motion formation distributed control algorithm for a team of mobile robots. The primary task for the team is to form a geometric shape, which can be freely translated and…
Aerial manipulation combines the versatility and speed of flying platforms with the functional capabilities of mobile manipulation, which presents significant challenges due to the need for precise localization and control. Traditionally,…
Safe autonomous navigation is an essential and challenging problem for robots operating in highly unstructured or completely unknown environments. Under these conditions, not only robotic systems must deal with limited localisation…