Related papers: CUREE: A Curious Underwater Robot for Ecosystem Ex…
Water quality monitoring is essential for protecting aquatic ecosystems and detecting environmental pollution. This paper presents the design and experimental validation of a bio-inspired miniature submarine for low-cost water quality…
Coral reefs are on the brink of collapse, with climate change, ocean acidification, and pollution leading to a projected 70-90% loss of coral species within the next decade. Reef restoration is crucial, but its success hinges on introducing…
Once deployed in the real world, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are out of reach for human supervision yet need to take decisions to adapt to unstable and unpredictable environments. To facilitate research on self-adaptive AUVs, this…
Uses of underwater videos to assess diversity and abundance of fish are being rapidly adopted by marine biologists. Manual processing of videos for quantification by human analysts is time and labour intensive. Automatic processing of…
Accurate traversability estimation is essential for safe and effective navigation of outdoor robots operating in complex environments. This paper introduces a novel experience-based method that allows robots to autonomously learn which…
This paper presents a reinforcement learning (RL) environment for developing an autonomous underwater robotic coral sampling agent, a crucial coral reef conservation and research task. Using software-in-the-loop (SIL) and…
Accurately quantifying and removing submerged underwater waste plays a crucial role in safeguarding marine life and preserving the environment. While detecting floating and surface debris is relatively straightforward, quantifying submerged…
This paper presents a soft earthworm robot that is capable of both efficient locomotion and obstacle avoidance. The robot is designed to replicate the unique locomotion mechanisms of earthworms, which enable them to move through narrow and…
Animal vocalisations and natural soundscapes are fascinating objects of study, and contain valuable evidence about animal behaviours, populations and ecosystems. They are studied in bioacoustics and ecoacoustics, with signal processing and…
Many species have evolved advanced non-visual perception while artificial systems fall behind. Radar and ultrasound complement camera-based vision but they are often too costly and complex to set up for very limited information gain. In…
Key challenges in developing underwater acoustic localization methods are related to the combined effects of high reverberation in intricate environments. To address such challenges, recent studies have shown that with a properly designed…
We present DAVE Aquatic Virtual Environment (DAVE), an open source simulation stack for underwater robots, sensors, and environments. Conventional robotics simulators are not designed to address unique challenges that come with the marine…
Soft robots offer unmatched adaptability and safety in unstructured environments, yet their compliant, high-dimensional, and nonlinear dynamics make modeling for control notoriously difficult. Existing data-driven approaches often fail to…
We consider the problem of autonomous mobile robot exploration in an unknown environment, taking into account a robot's coverage rate, map uncertainty, and state estimation uncertainty. This paper presents a novel exploration framework for…
The rise of embodied AI applications has enabled robots to perform complex tasks which require a sophisticated understanding of their environment. To enable successful robot operation in such settings, maps must be constructed so that they…
In the context of visual navigation in unknown scenes, both "exploration" and "exploitation" are equally crucial. Robots must first establish environmental cognition through exploration and then utilize the cognitive information to…
CorStitch is an open-source software developed to automate the creation of accurate georeferenced reef mosaics from video transects obtained through Automated Rapid Reef Assessment System surveys. We utilized a Fourier-based image…
African penguins (Spheniscus demersus) are an endangered species. Little is known regarding their underwater hunting strategies and associated predation success rates, yet this is essential for guiding conservation. Modern bio-logging…
Stable traversal over geometrically complex terrain increasingly requires exteroceptive perception, yet prior perceptive humanoid locomotion methods often remain tied to explicit geometric abstractions, either by mediating control through…
Deep-sea robot operations demand a high level of safety, efficiency and reliability. As a consequence, measures within the development stage have to be implemented to extensively evaluate and benchmark system components ranging from data…