Related papers: Rhino: An Autonomous Robot for Mapping Underground…
Autonomous exploration requires robots to generate informative trajectories iteratively. Although sampling-based methods are highly efficient in unmanned aerial vehicle exploration, many of these methods do not effectively utilize the…
Designing an in-pipe climbing robot that manipulates sharp gears to study complex line relationships. Traditional rolling/happening pipe climbing robots tend to slide when exploring pipe curves. The proposed gearbox connects to the farthest…
In this paper, we developed a new navigation system, which detects obstacles in a sliding window with an adaptive threshold clustering algorithm, classifies the detected obstacles with a decision tree, heuristically predicts potential…
Autonomous navigation of steel bridge inspection robots is essential for proper maintenance. The majority of existing robotic solutions for steel bridge inspection requires human intervention to assist in the control and navigation. In this…
This article presents a novel framework for performing visual inspection around 3D infrastructures, by establishing a team of fully autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) with robust localization, planning and perception capabilities. The…
The next generation of Mars rotorcrafts requires on-board autonomous hazard avoidance landing. To this end, this work proposes a system that performs continuous multi-resolution height map reconstruction and safe landing spot detection.…
Tunnel construction using the drill-and-blast method requires the 3D measurement of the excavation front to evaluate underbreak locations. Considering the inspection and measurement task's safety, cost, and efficiency, deploying lightweight…
Developing excavation autonomy is challenging given the environments where excavators operate, the complexity of physical interaction and the degrees of freedom of operation of the excavator itself. Simulation is a useful tool to build…
In search and rescue missions, time is an important factor; fast navigation and quickly acquiring situation awareness might be matters of life and death. Hence, the use of robots in such scenarios has been restricted by the time needed to…
Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) need to operate for days without human intervention and thus must be able to do efficient and reliable task planning. Unfortunately, efficient task planning requires deliberately abstract domain models…
Enabling autonomous robots to safely and efficiently navigate, explore, and map underwater caves is of significant importance to water resource management, hydrogeology, archaeology, and marine robotics. In this work, we demonstrate the…
Search and rescue environments exhibit challenging 3D geometry (e.g., confined spaces, rubble, and breakdown), which necessitates agile and maneuverable aerial robotic systems. Because these systems are size, weight, and power (SWaP)…
We present a terrain traversability mapping and navigation system (TNS) for autonomous excavator applications in an unstructured environment. We use an efficient approach to extract terrain features from RGB images and 3D point clouds and…
We consider an autonomous exploration problem in which a range-sensing mobile robot is tasked with accurately mapping the landmarks in an a priori unknown environment efficiently in real-time; it must choose sensing actions that both curb…
Artificial intelligence has undergone immense growth and maturation in recent years, though autonomous systems have traditionally struggled when fielded in diverse and previously unknown environments. DARPA is seeking to change that with…
Mapping is a time-consuming process for deploying robotic systems to new environments. The handling of maps is also risk-adverse when not managed effectively. We propose here, a standardised approach to handling such maps in a manner which…
Micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) hold the potential for performing autonomous and contactless land surveys for the detection of landmines and explosive remnants of war (ERW). Metal detectors are the standard detection tool but must be operated…
We propose a novel hybrid system (both hardware and software) of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) carrying a miniature Unmanned Ground Vehicle (miniUGV) to perform a complex search and manipulation task. This system leverages heterogeneous…
Exploration in dynamic and uncertain real-world environments is an open problem in robotics and constitutes a foundational capability of autonomous systems operating in most of the real world. While 3D exploration planning has been…
Construction safety inspection remains mostly manual, and automated approaches still rely on task-specific datasets that are hard to maintain in fast-changing construction environments due to frequent retraining. Meanwhile, field inspection…