Related papers: Risk-Aware Navigation for Mobile Robots in Unknown…
Active perception in uncertain environments requires robots to navigate safely while acquiring informative observations to reduce map uncertainty. These objectives inherently conflict, as informative viewpoints often lie near uncertain…
Autonomous driving vehicles provide a vast potential for realizing use cases in the on-road and off-road domains. Consequently, remarkable solutions exist to autonomous systems' environmental perception and control. Nevertheless, proof of…
One of the critical challenges in automated driving is ensuring safety of automated vehicles despite the unknown behavior of the other vehicles. Although motion prediction modules are able to generate a probability distribution associated…
In this paper, a robot navigating an environment shared with humans is considered, and a cost function that can be exploited in $\text{RRT}^\text{X}$, a randomized sampling-based replanning algorithm that guarantees asymptotic optimality,…
Real-world applications require a robot operating in the physical world with awareness of potential risks besides accomplishing the task. A large part of risky behaviors arises from interacting with objects in ignorance of affordance. To…
Distance-based reward mechanisms in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) navigation systems suffer from critical safety limitations in dynamic environments, frequently resulting in collisions when visibility is restricted. We propose DRL-NSUO,…
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…
In this paper, we propose a novel approach to wheeled robot navigation through an environment with movable obstacles. A robot exploits knowledge about different obstacle classes and selects the minimally invasive action to perform to clear…
This work proposes a novel transformation termed the conformal navigation transformation to achieve collision-free navigation of a robot in a workspace populated with arbitrary polygonal obstacles. The properties of the conformal navigation…
Autonomous navigation capabilities play a critical role in service robots operating in environments where human interactions are pivotal, due to the dynamic and unpredictable nature of these environments. However, the variability in human…
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…
Robotic manipulation research has investigated contact-rich problems and strategies that require robots to intentionally collide with their environment, to accomplish tasks that cannot be handled by traditional collision-free solutions. By…
Continuum robots are well suited for navigating confined and fragile environments, such as vascular or endoluminal anatomy, where contact with surrounding structures is often unavoidable. While controlled contact can assist motion,…
It is challenging for a mobile robot to navigate through human crowds. Existing approaches usually assume that pedestrians follow a predefined collision avoidance strategy, like social force model (SFM) or optimal reciprocal collision…
This work proposes a novel approach to social robot navigation by learning to generate robot controls from a social motion latent space. By leveraging this social motion latent space, the proposed method achieves significant improvements in…
To achieve autonomy in unknown and unstructured environments, we propose a method for semantic-based planning under perceptual uncertainty. This capability is crucial for safe and efficient robot navigation in environment with…
Uncertainty-aware robot motion prediction is crucial for downstream traversability estimation and safe autonomous navigation in unstructured, off-road environments, where terrain is heterogeneous and perceptual uncertainty is high. Most…
This work tackles scene understanding for outdoor robotic navigation, solely relying on images captured by an on-board camera. Conventional visual scene understanding interprets the environment based on specific descriptive categories.…
Mobile robots are being used on a large scale in various crowded situations and become part of our society. The socially acceptable navigation behavior of a mobile robot with individual human consideration is an essential requirement for…
This paper develops a path planner that minimizes risk (e.g. motion execution) while maximizing accumulated reward (e.g., quality of sensor viewpoint) motivated by visual assistance or tracking scenarios in unstructured or confined…