Related papers: Rhino: An Autonomous Robot for Mapping Underground…

With ever-increasing productivity targets in mining operations, there is a growing interest in mining automation. In future mines, remote-controlled and autonomous haulers will operate underground guided by LiDAR sensors. We envision…

A key challenge in fast ground robot navigation in 3D terrain is balancing robot speed and safety. Recent work has shown that 2.5D maps (2D representations with additional 3D information) are ideal for real-time safe and fast planning.…

The request for fast response and safe operation after natural and man-made disasters in urban environments has spurred the development of robotic systems designed to assist in search and rescue operations within complex rubble sites.…

Majority of the existing robot navigation systems, which facilitate the use of laser range finders, sonar sensors or artificial landmarks, has the ability to locate itself in an unknown environment and then build a map of the corresponding…

Laser scanning can provide timely assessments of mine sites despite adverse challenges in the operational environment. Although there are several published articles on laser scanning, there is a need to review them in the context of…

This paper presents a method for cave surveying in total darkness using an autonomous aerial vehicle equipped with a depth camera for mapping, downward-facing camera for state estimation, and forward and downward lights. Traditional methods…

This study presents a new methodology for learning-based motion planning for autonomous exploration using aerial robots. Through the reinforcement learning method of learning through trial and error, the action policy is derived that can…

Mobile robots dedicated in security tasks should be capable of clearly perceiving their environment to competently navigate within cluttered areas, so as to accomplish their assigned mission. The paper in hand describes such an autonomous…

We address the problem of autonomous exploration and mapping for a mobile robot using visual inputs. Exploration and mapping is a well-known and key problem in robotics, the goal of which is to enable a robot to explore a new environment…

In this paper, a novel approach is introduced which utilizes a Rapidly-exploring Random Graph to improve sampling-based autonomous exploration of unknown environments with unmanned ground vehicles compared to the current state of the art.…

Autonomous robotic exploration of unknown and hazardous environments, a long-standing challenge, can be significantly improved by leveraging the advanced reasoning of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). We introduce a novel exploration pipeline…

In today's chemical plants, human field operators perform frequent integrity checks to guarantee high safety standards, and thus are possibly the first to encounter dangerous operating conditions. To alleviate their task, we present a…

Drones are a promising technology for autonomous data collection and indoor sensing. In situations when human-controlled UAVs may not be practical or dependable, such as in uncharted or dangerous locations, the usage of autonomous UAVs…

Currently, mobile robots are developing rapidly and are finding numerous applications in the industry. However, several problems remain related to their practical use, such as the need for expensive hardware and high power consumption…

This work presents a 3D multi-robot exploration framework for a team of UGVs moving on uneven terrains. The framework was designed by casting the two-level coordination strategy presented in [1] into the context of multi-robot exploration.…

Landmines, specifically anti-tank mines, cluster bombs, and unexploded ordnance form a serious problem in many countries. Several landmine sweeping techniques are used for minesweeping. This paper presents the design and the implementation…

Autonomous exploration allows mobile robots to navigate in initially unknown territories in order to build complete representations of the environments. In many real-life applications, environments often contain dynamic obstacles which can…

This paper proposes an efficient hybrid localization framework for the autonomous navigation of an unmanned ground vehicle in uneven or rough terrain, as well as techniques for detailed processing of 3D point cloud data. The framework is an…

Autonomous navigation is essential for steel bridge inspection robot to monitor and maintain the working condition of steel bridges. Majority of existing robotic solutions requires human support to navigate the robot doing the inspection.…

A hybrid map representation, which consists of a modified generalized Voronoi Diagram (GVD)-based topological map and a grid-based metric map, is proposed to facilitate a new frontier-driven exploration strategy. Exploration frontiers are…