Related papers: Rhino: An Autonomous Robot for Mapping Underground…
This paper explores the question of creating and maintaining terrain maps in environments where the terrain changes. The specific example explored is the construction of terrain maps from 3D LiDAR measurements on an electric rope shovel.…
Autonomous terrain classification is an important problem in planetary navigation, whether the goal is to identify scientific sites of interest or to traverse treacherous areas safely. Past Martian rovers have relied on human operators to…
A robot navigating an outdoor environment with no prior knowledge of the space must rely on its local sensing to perceive its surroundings and plan. This can come in the form of a local metric map or local policy with some fixed horizon.…
Future Moon bases will likely be constructed using resources mined from the surface of the Moon. The difficulty of maintaining a human workforce on the Moon and communications lag with Earth means that mining will need to be conducted using…
Autonomous exploration of unknown space is an essential component for the deployment of mobile robots in the real world. Safe navigation is crucial for all robotics applications and requires accurate and consistent maps of the robot's…
The task of establishing and maintaining situational awareness in an unknown environment is a critical step to fulfil in a mission related to the field of rescue robotics. Predominantly, the problem of visual inspection of urban structures…
Underground mining operations face significant safety challenges that make emergency response capabilities crucial. While robots have shown promise in assisting with search and rescue operations, their effectiveness depends on reliable…
Exploration is a fundamental problem in robot autonomy. A major limitation, however, is that during exploration robots oftentimes have to rely on on-board systems alone for state estimation, accumulating significant drift over time in large…
This paper presents algorithms to navigate and avoid obstacles for an in-door autonomous mobile robot. A laser range finder is used to obtain 3D images of the environment. A new algorithm, namely 3D-to-2D image pressure and barriers…
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is an essential component of autonomous robotic applications and self-driving vehicles, enabling them to understand and operate in their environment. Many SLAM systems have been proposed in the…
Robots will bring search and rescue (SaR) in disaster response to another level, in case they can autonomously take over dangerous SaR tasks from humans. A main challenge for autonomous SaR robots is to safely navigate in cluttered…
A key capability for autonomous underground mining vehicles is real-time accurate localisation. While significant progress has been made, currently deployed systems have several limitations ranging from dependence on costly additional…
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…
Exploration of unknown, unstructured environments, such as in search and rescue, cave exploration, and planetary missions,presents significant challenges due to their unpredictable nature. This unpredictability can lead to inefficient path…
The increasing demand for critical raw materials has revitalized interest in abandoned underground mines, which pose extreme challenges for conventional drilling machinery due to confined, unstructured, and infrastructure-less environments.…
Legged robots are increasingly being adopted in industries such as oil, gas, mining, nuclear, and agriculture. However, new challenges exist when moving into natural, less-structured environments, such as forestry applications. This paper…
Surround-view depth estimation is a crucial task aims to acquire the depth maps of the surrounding views. It has many applications in real world scenarios such as autonomous driving, AR/VR and 3D reconstruction, etc. However, given that…
The paper proposes a reliable and robust planning solution to the long range robotic navigation problem in extremely cluttered environments. A two-layer planning architecture is proposed that leverages both the environment map and the…
The use of robotics in humanitarian demining increasingly involves computer vision techniques to improve landmine detection capabilities. However, in the absence of diverse and realistic datasets, the reliable validation of algorithms…
Advances in planetary robotics have led to wheeled robots that have beamed back invaluable science data from the surface of the Moon and Mars. However, these large wheeled robots are unable to access rugged environments such as cliffs,…