Related papers: Learning and Autonomy for Extraterrestrial Terrain…
Autonomous navigation in off-road environments remains a significant challenge in field robotics, particularly for Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) tasked with search and rescue, exploration, and surveillance. Effective long-range planning…
The exploration of unknown, Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) denied environments by an autonomous communication-aware and collaborative group of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) presents significant challenges in coordination,…
We present a method for solving the coverage problem with the objective of autonomously exploring an unknown environment under mission time constraints. Here, the robot is tasked with planning a path over a horizon such that the accumulated…
Estimating the pose of an uncooperative spacecraft is an important computer vision problem for enabling the deployment of automatic vision-based systems in orbit, with applications ranging from on-orbit servicing to space debris removal.…
Autonomous underwater robots are increasingly deployed for environmental monitoring, infrastructure inspection, subsea resource exploration, and long-horizon exploration. Yet, despite rapid advances in learning-based planning and control,…
In recent years, there has been a growing demand for improved autonomy for in-orbit operations such as rendezvous, docking, and proximity maneuvers, leading to increased interest in employing Deep Learning-based Spacecraft Pose Estimation…
We present a modular, full-stack autonomy system for lunar surface navigation and mapping developed for the Lunar Autonomy Challenge. Operating in a GNSS-denied, visually challenging environment, our pipeline integrates semantic…
Understanding the geometric and semantic properties of the scene is crucial in autonomous navigation and particularly challenging in the case of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation. Such information may be by obtained by estimating…
Equipping active colloidal robots with intelligence such that they can efficiently navigate in unknown complex environments could dramatically impact their use in emerging applications like precision surgery and targeted drug delivery. Here…
The climate crisis we are facing calls for significant improvements in our understanding of natural phenomena, with clouds being identified as a dominant source of uncertainty. To this end, the emerging field of 3D computed cloud tomography…
Traditional robot navigation systems primarily utilize occupancy grid maps and laser-based sensing technologies, as demonstrated by the popular move_base package in ROS. Unlike robots, humans navigate not only through spatial awareness and…
This paper provides a review of deep learning applications in scene understanding in autonomous robots, including innovations in object detection, semantic and instance segmentation, depth estimation, 3D reconstruction, and visual SLAM. It…
Future Mars missions will require advanced guidance, navigation, and control algorithms for the powered descent phase to target specific surface locations and achieve pinpoint accuracy (landing error ellipse $<$ 5 m radius). The latter…
Hazard detection is critical for enabling autonomous landing on planetary surfaces. Current state-of-the-art methods leverage traditional computer vision approaches to automate the identification of safe terrain from input digital elevation…
This paper focuses on a novel robotic system MorphoLander representing heterogeneous swarm of drones for exploring rough terrain environments. The morphogenetic leader drone is capable of landing on uneven terrain, traversing it, and…
In defense-related remote sensing applications, such as vehicle detection on satellite imagery, supervised learning requires a huge number of labeled examples to reach operational performances. Such data are challenging to obtain as it…
This work addresses the challenge of training supervised machine or deep learning models on orbiting platforms where we are generally constrained by limited on-board hardware capabilities and restricted uplink bandwidths to upload. We aim…
The growing demand for aerial connectivity with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) across diverse settings, ranging from urban to rural scenarios, requires developing a better understanding of spectrum occupancy at aerial corridors. In…
Long-distance driving is an important component of planetary surface exploration. Unforeseen events often require human operators to adjust mobility plans, but this approach does not scale and will be insufficient for future missions.…
This paper presents a new framework to use images as the inputs for the controller to have autonomous flight, considering the noisy indoor environment and uncertainties. A new Proportional-Integral-Derivative-Accelerated (PIDA) control with…