Related papers: PRIEST: Projection Guided Sampling-Based Optimizat…
Automated decision-making is becoming key for automated characterization including electron and scanning probe microscopies and nano indentation. Most machine learning driven workflows optimize a single predefined objective and tend to…
Learning-based path planning is becoming a promising robot navigation methodology due to its adaptability to various environments. However, the expensive computing and storage associated with networks impose significant challenges for their…
Optimal path planning is prone to convergence to local, rather than global, optima. This is often the case for mobile manipulators due to nonconvexities induced by obstacles, robot kinematics and constraints. This paper focuses on planning…
Robotic systems must be able to quickly and robustly make decisions when operating in uncertain and dynamic environments. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) can be used to compute optimal policies with little prior knowledge about the…
The objective of this study is to enable fast and safe manipulation tasks in home environments. Specifically, we aim to develop a system that can recognize its surroundings and identify target objects while in motion, enabling it to plan…
Robot path planning plays a pivotal role in enabling autonomous systems to navigate safely and efficiently in complex and uncertain environments. Despite extensive research on classical graph-based methods and sampling-based planners,…
Gathering visual information effectively to monitor known environments is a key challenge in robotics. To be as efficient as human surveyors, robotic systems must continuously collect observational data required to complete their survey…
Sampling-based path planning algorithms usually implement uniform sampling methods to search the state space. However, uniform sampling may lead to unnecessary exploration in many scenarios, such as the environment with a few dead ends. Our…
Autonomous aerial target tracking in unstructured and GPS-denied environments remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. Many existing methods rely on motion capture systems, pre-mapped scenes, or feature-based localization to ensure…
Sampling-based planning is the predominant paradigm for motion planning in robotics. Most sampling-based planners use a global random sampling scheme to guarantee probabilistic completeness. However, most schemes are often inefficient as…
Fixed-budget nonconvex optimization can fail not because local descent is unstable, but because it is too stable: after reaching a nearby stationary point, an optimizer may spend the remaining evaluations refining an uninformative local…
Imitation learning provides a powerful framework for goal-conditioned visual navigation in mobile robots, enabling obstacle avoidance while respecting human preferences and social norms. However, its effectiveness depends critically on the…
Most Probable Explanation (MPE) inference in Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGMs) is a fundamental yet computationally challenging problem arising in domains such as diagnosis, planning, and structured prediction. In many practical…
Consider convex optimization problems subject to a large number of constraints. We focus on stochastic problems in which the objective takes the form of expected values and the feasible set is the intersection of a large number of convex…
The paper presents a distributed algorithm, called Prediction-based Opportunistic Sensing for Resilient and Efficient Sensor Networks (POSE.R), where the sensor nodes utilize predictions of the targets positions to probabilistically control…
This paper presents the development and evaluation of an optimization-based autonomous trajectory planning algorithm for the asteroid reconnaissance phase of a deep-space exploration mission. The reconnaissance phase is a low-altitude flyby…
Autonomous navigation often requires the simultaneous optimization of multiple objectives. The most common approach scalarizes these into a single cost function using a weighted sum, but this method is unable to find all possible trade-offs…
When driving, people make decisions based on current traffic as well as their desired route. They have a mental map of known routes and are often able to navigate without needing directions. Current self-driving models improve their…
We present Model Predictive Trees (MPT), a receding horizon tree search algorithm that improves its performance by reusing information efficiently. Whereas existing solvers reuse only the highest-quality trajectory from the previous…
In the field of global optimization, many existing algorithms face challenges posed by non-convex target functions and high computational complexity or unavailability of gradient information. These limitations, exacerbated by sensitivity to…