Related papers: HALO: Hazard-Aware Landing Optimization for Autono…
Robots and particularly drones are especially useful in exploring extreme environments that pose hazards to humans. To ensure safe operations in these situations, usually perceptually degraded and without good GNSS, it is critical to have a…
This paper proposes a novel adaptive guidance system developed using reinforcement meta-learning with a recurrent policy and value function approximator. The use of recurrent network layers allows the deployed policy to adapt real time to…
Ensuring safety and driving consistency is a significant challenge for autonomous vehicles operating in partially observed environments. This work introduces a consistent parallel trajectory optimization (CPTO) approach to enable safe and…
For intelligent quadcopter UAVs, a robust and reliable autonomous planning system is crucial. Most current trajectory planning methods for UAVs are suitable for static environments but struggle to handle dynamic obstacles, which can pose…
This research proposes a new integrated framework for identifying safe landing locations and planning in-flight divert maneuvers. The state-of-the-art algorithms for landing zone selection utilize local terrain features such as slopes and…
Planning safe trajectories for autonomous vehicles is essential for operational safety but remains extremely challenging due to the complex interactions among traffic participants. Recent autonomous driving frameworks have focused on…
We study the nonlinear observability of a systems states in view of how well they are observable and what control inputs would improve the convergence of their estimates. We use these insights to develop an observability-aware…
Finding the most likely path to a set of failure states is important to the analysis of safety-critical systems that operate over a sequence of time steps, such as aircraft collision avoidance systems and autonomous cars. In many…
This paper presents the preliminary design of the descent and landing trajectory of the ESA Argonaut lunar lander. The mission scenario and driving system constraints are presented and accounted for in the design of a fuel-optimal…
Autonomous collision avoidance requires accurate environmental perception; however, flight systems often possess limited sensing capabilities with field-of-view (FOV) restrictions. To navigate this challenge, we present a safety-aware…
Long-distance driving is an important component of planetary surface exploration. Unforeseen events often require human operators to adjust mobility plans, but this approach does not scale and will be insufficient for future missions.…
Securing petroleum infrastructure requires balancing autonomous system efficiency with human judgment for threat escalation, a challenge unaddressed by classical facility location models assuming homogeneous resources. This paper formulates…
Multi-Agent Task Assignment and Planning (MATP) has attracted growing attention but remains challenging in terms of scalability, spatial reasoning, and adaptability in obstacle-rich environments. To address these challenges, we propose OATH…
Autonomous vehicles interacting with other traffic participants heavily rely on the perception and prediction of other agents' behaviors to plan safe trajectories. However, as occlusions limit the vehicle's perception ability, reasoning…
Consider a robot operating in an uncertain environment with stochastic, dynamic obstacles. Despite the clear benefits for trajectory optimization, it is often hard to keep track of each obstacle at every time step due to sensing and…
Quadrotors hold significant promise for several applications such as agriculture, search and rescue, and infrastructure inspection. Achieving autonomous operation requires systems to navigate safely through complex and unfamiliar…
Balancing safety and efficiency when planning in crowded scenarios with uncertain dynamics is challenging where it is imperative to accomplish the robot's mission without incurring any safety violations. Typically, chance constraints are…
Vehicle safety depends on (a) the range of identified hazards and (b) the operational situations for which mitigations of these hazards are acceptably decreasing risk. Moreover, with an increasing degree of autonomy, risk ownership is…
We develop a probabilistic framework for \emph{rendezvous planning}: given sparse, noisy observations of a fast-moving target, plan rendezvous spatiotemporal coordinates for a set of significantly slower seeking agents. The unknown target…
Future Mars missions will require advanced guidance, navigation, and control algorithms for the powered descent phase to target specific surface locations and achieve pinpoint accuracy (landing error ellipse $<$ 5 m radius). The latter…