Related papers: Rhino: An Autonomous Robot for Mapping Underground…
While the capabilities of autonomous systems have been steadily improving in recent years, these systems still struggle to rapidly explore previously unknown environments without the aid of GPS-assisted navigation. The DARPA Subterranean…
In robotic applications, a key requirement for safe and efficient motion planning is the ability to map obstacle-free space in unknown, cluttered 3D environments. However, commodity-grade RGB-D cameras commonly used for sensing fail to…
As labor shortages and productivity stagnation increasingly challenge the construction industry, automation has become essential for sustainable infrastructure development. This paper presents an autonomous payload transportation system as…
Safe robot navigation is a fundamental research field for autonomous robots including ground mobile robots and flying robots. The primary objective of a safe robot navigation algorithm is to guide an autonomous robot from its initial…
The recent advance in autonomous underwater robotics facilitates autonomous inspection tasks of offshore infrastructure. However, current inspection missions rely on predefined plans created offline, hampering the flexibility and autonomy…
Autonomous navigation of ground robots on uneven terrain is being considered in more and more tasks. However, uneven terrain will bring two problems to motion planning: how to assess the traversability of the terrain and how to cope with…
Robotic exploration of unknown environments is fundamentally a problem of decision making under uncertainty where the robot must account for uncertainty in sensor measurements, localization, action execution, as well as many other factors.…
Unstructured environments such as mountains, caves, construction sites, or disaster areas are challenging for autonomous navigation because of terrain irregularities. In particular, it is crucial to plan a path to avoid risky terrain and…
This article proposes a Deep Learning (DL) method to enable fully autonomous flights for low-cost Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) in unknown dark underground mine tunnels. This kind of environments pose multiple challenges including lack of…
The threat to safety of aging bridges has been recognized as a critical concern to the general public due to the poor condition of many bridges in the U.S. Currently, the bridge inspection is conducted manually, and it is not efficient to…
Subterranean environments with lots of obstacles, including narrow passages, large voids, rock falls and absence of illumination were always challenging for control, navigation, and perception of mobile robots. The limited availability and…
The mining sector increasingly adopts digital tools to improve operational efficiency, safety, and data-driven decision-making. One of the key challenges remains the reliable acquisition of high-resolution, geo-referenced spatial…
During missions involving radiation exposure, unmanned robotic platforms may embody a valuable tool, especially thanks to their capability of replacing human operators in certain tasks to eliminate the health risks associated with such an…
As autonomous robots are becoming more widespread, more attention is being paid to the security of robotic operation. Autonomous robots can be seen as cyber-physical systems: they can operate in virtual, physical, and human realms.…
This paper addresses real-time dense 3D reconstruction for a resource-constrained Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). Underwater vision-guided operations are among the most challenging as they combine 3D motion in the presence of external…
Autonomous navigation in unstructured environments requires robots to assess terrain difficulty in real-time and plan paths that balance efficiency with safety. This thesis presents a traversability-aware navigation framework for the M4…
Landmines have been extensively used in conflict zones as an indiscriminate weapon to control military movements, often remaining active long after hostilities have ended. Their presence poses a persistent danger to civilians, hindering…
Selecting safe landing sites in non-cooperative environments is a key step towards the full autonomy of UAVs. However, the existing methods have the common problems of poor generalization ability and robustness. Their performance in unknown…
Safety is a crucial property of every robotic platform: any control policy should always comply with actuator limits and avoid collisions with the environment and humans. In reinforcement learning, safety is even more fundamental for…
This work introduces a cooperative inspection system designed to efficiently control and coordinate a team of distributed heterogeneous UAV agents for the inspection of 3D structures in cluttered, unknown spaces. Our proposed approach…