Related papers: Active Robot Vision for Distant Object Change Dete…

Mobile robots rely on maps to navigate through an environment. In the absence of any map, the robots must build the map online from partial observations as they move in the environment. Traditional methods build a map using only direct…

Mobile service robots are increasingly prevalent in human-centric, real-world domains, operating autonomously in unconstrained indoor environments. In such a context, robotic vision plays a central role in enabling service robots to…

Most common tasks for robots in dynamic spaces require that the environment is regularly and actively perceived, with many of them explicitly requiring objects or persons to be within view, i.e., for monitoring or safety. However, solving…

Model-based control is a popular paradigm for robot navigation because it can leverage a known dynamics model to efficiently plan robust robot trajectories. However, it is challenging to use model-based methods in settings where the…

Deep Learning (DL) has brought significant advances to robotics vision tasks. However, most existing DL methods have a major shortcoming, they rely on a static inference paradigm inherent in traditional computer vision pipelines. On the…

We propose to take a novel approach to robot system design where each building block of a larger system is represented as a differentiable program, i.e. a deep neural network. This representation allows for integrating algorithmic planning…

Real-world manipulation problems in heavy clutter require robots to reason about potential contacts with objects in the environment. We focus on pick-and-place style tasks to retrieve a target object from a shelf where some `movable'…

This paper addresses the problem of mobile grasping in dynamic, unknown environments where a robot must operate under a limited field-of-view. The fundamental challenge is the inherent trade-off between ``seeing'' around to reduce…

This paper addresses object perception applied to mobile robotics. Being able to perceive semantically meaningful objects in unstructured environments is a key capability in order to make robots suitable to perform high-level tasks in home…

If a robotic agent wants to exploit symbolic planning techniques to achieve some goal, it must be able to properly ground an abstract planning domain in the environment in which it operates. However, if the environment is initially unknown…

One of the central problems in computer vision is the detection of semantically important objects and the estimation of their pose. Most of the work in object detection has been based on single image processing and its performance is…

Active localization is the problem of generating robot actions that allow it to maximally disambiguate its pose within a reference map. Traditional approaches to this use an information-theoretic criterion for action selection and…

Active Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is the problem of planning and controlling the motion of a robot to build the most accurate and complete model of the surrounding environment. Since the first foundational work in active…

Visual exploration and smart data collection via autonomous vehicles is an attractive topic in various disciplines. Disturbances like wind significantly influence both the power consumption of the flying robots and the performance of the…

The deployment of autonomous service robots in human-centric environments is hindered by a critical gap in perception and planning. Traditional navigation systems rely on expensive LiDARs that, while geometrically precise, are semantically…

We propose a novel receding horizon planner for an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) performing path planning in urban waterways. Feasible paths are found by repeatedly generating and searching a graph reflecting the obstacles observed in…

Legged robots, particularly quadrupeds, offer promising navigation capabilities, especially in scenarios requiring traversal over diverse terrains and obstacle avoidance. This paper addresses the challenge of enabling legged robots to…

Mobile robot platforms will increasingly be tasked with activities that involve grasping and manipulating objects in open world environments. Affordance understanding provides a robot with means to realise its goals and execute its tasks,…

Manipulation planning is the problem of finding a sequence of robot configurations that involves interactions with objects in the scene, e.g., grasping and placing an object, or more general tool-use. To achieve such interactions,…

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) have been standing out due to the wide range of applications in which they can be used autonomously. However, they need intelligent systems capable of providing a greater understanding of what they perceive to…