Related papers: Visual Environment Assessment for Safe Autonomous …
Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is a fundamental yet challenging task for small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). The core reasons are the extreme viewpoint changes, and limited computational power onboard a UAV which restricts the…
Understanding terrain topology at long-range is crucial for the success of off-road robotic missions, especially when navigating at high-speeds. LiDAR sensors, which are currently heavily relied upon for geometric mapping, provide sparse…
Unmapped areas and aerodynamic disturbances render autonomous navigation with quadrotors extremely challenging. To fly safely and efficiently, trajectory planners and trackers must be able to navigate unknown environments with unpredictable…
Autonomous navigation in unstructured environments requires robots to assess terrain difficulty in real-time and plan paths that balance efficiency with safety. This thesis presents a traversability-aware navigation framework for the M4…
Automatic optimization of robotic behavior has been the long-standing goal of Evolutionary Robotics. Allowing the problem at hand to be solved by automation often leads to novel approaches and new insights. A common problem encountered with…
Agile quadrotor flight pushes the limits of control, actuation, and onboard perception. While time-optimal trajectory planning has been extensively studied, existing approaches typically neglect the tight coupling between vehicle dynamics,…
ViVa-SAFELAND is an open source software library, aimed to test and evaluate vision-based navigation strategies for aerial vehicles, with special interest in autonomous landing, while complying with legal regulations and people's safety. It…
Accurate localization in diverse environments is a fundamental challenge in computer vision and robotics. The task involves determining a sensor's precise position and orientation, typically a camera, within a given space. Traditional…
Autonomous vehicle manufacturers recognize that LiDAR provides accurate 3D views and precise distance measures under highly uncertain driving conditions. Its practical implementation, however, remains costly. This paper investigates the…
Within a perception framework for autonomous mobile and robotic systems, semantic analysis of 3D point clouds typically generated by LiDARs is key to numerous applications, such as object detection and recognition, and scene reconstruction.…
This paper presents a vision-based methodology which makes use of a stereo camera rig and a one dimension LiDAR to estimate free obstacle areas for quadrotor navigation. The presented approach fuses information provided by a depth map from…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), equipped with camera sensors can facilitate enhanced situational awareness for many emergency response and disaster management applications since they are capable of operating in remote and difficult to…
A key challenge in fast ground robot navigation in 3D terrain is balancing robot speed and safety. Recent work has shown that 2.5D maps (2D representations with additional 3D information) are ideal for real-time safe and fast planning.…
Localization in a global map is critical to success in many autonomous robot missions. This is particularly challenging for multi-robot operations in unknown and adverse environments. Here, we are concerned with providing a small unmanned…
Obstacle avoidance is a key feature for safe Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation. While solutions have been proposed for static obstacle avoidance, systems enabling avoidance of dynamic objects, such as drones, are hard to implement…
The growing use of mobile robots in sectors such as automotive, agriculture, and rescue operations reflects progress in robotics and autonomy. In unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), most research emphasizes visual SLAM, sensor fusion, and path…
We propose a novel method for geolocalizing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in environments lacking Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). Current state-of-the-art techniques employ an offline-trained encoder to generate a vector…
A comprehensive understanding of 3D scenes is essential for autonomous vehicles (AVs), and among various perception tasks, occupancy estimation plays a central role by providing a general representation of drivable and occupied space.…
This article presents novel designs of autonomous UAV prototypes specifically developed for inspecting GPS-denied tunnel construction environments with dynamic human and robotic presence. Our UAVs integrate advanced sensor suites and robust…
Object pose estimation is a crucial prerequisite for robots to perform autonomous manipulation in clutter. Real-world bin-picking settings such as warehouses present additional challenges, e.g., new objects are added constantly. Most of the…