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In this paper, we address the problem of autonomous multi-robot mapping, exploration and navigation in unknown, GPS-denied indoor or urban environments using a swarm of robots equipped with directional sensors with limited sensing…
Safe autonomous exploration of unknown environments is an essential skill for mobile robots to effectively and adaptively perform environmental mapping for diverse critical tasks. Due to its simplicity, most existing exploration methods…
To perform tasks well in a new domain, one must first know something about it. This paper reports on a robot controller for navigation through unfamiliar indoor worlds. Based on spatial affordances, it integrates planning with reactive…
A key requirement in robotics is the ability to simultaneously self-localize and map a previously unknown environment, relying primarily on onboard sensing and computation. Achieving fully onboard accurate simultaneous localization and…
Autonomous navigation systems based on computer vision sensors often require sophisticated robotics platforms which are very expensive. This poses a barrier for the implementation and testing of complex localization, mapping, and navigation…
Enabling robots to autonomously navigate unknown, complex, and dynamic real-world environments presents several challenges, including imperfect perception, partial observability, localization uncertainty, and safety constraints. Current…
This article presents AutoRally, a 1$:$5 scale robotics testbed for autonomous vehicle research. AutoRally is designed for robustness, ease of use, and reproducibility, so that a team of two people with limited knowledge of mechanical…
Autonomous navigation in complex, unstructured outdoor environments requires robots to operate over long ranges without prior maps and limited depth sensing. In such settings, relying solely on geometric frontiers for exploration is often…
The increasingly complex and diverse planetary exploration environment requires more adaptable and flexible rover navigation strategy. In this study, we propose a VLM-empowered multi-mode system to achieve efficient while safe autonomous…
Autonomous aerial robots are increasingly being deployed in real-world scenarios, where transparent glass obstacles present significant challenges to reliable navigation. Researchers have investigated the use of non-contact sensors and…
This paper develops a communication-efficient distributed mapping approach for rapid exploration of a cave by a multi-robot team. Subsurface planetary exploration is an unsolved problem challenged by communication, power, and compute…
An intelligent robot can be used for applications where a human is at significant risk (like nuclear, space, military), the economics or menial nature of the application result in inefficient use of human workers (service industry,…
We present Scratchy---a modular, lightweight robot built for low budget competition attendances. Its base is mainly built with standard 4040 aluminium profiles and the robot is driven by four mecanum wheels on brushless DC motors. In…
Autonomous navigation is essential for steel bridge inspection robot to monitor and maintain the working condition of steel bridges. Majority of existing robotic solutions requires human support to navigate the robot doing the inspection.…
Inter-robot loop closure detection, e.g., for collaborative simultaneous localization and mapping (CSLAM), is a fundamental capability for many multirobot applications in GPS-denied regimes. In real-world scenarios, this is a…
Collaborative multi-agent exploration of unknown environments is crucial for search and rescue operations. Effective real-world deployment must address challenges such as limited inter-agent communication and static and dynamic obstacles.…
In recent years, the Robot Operating System (ROS) is developing rapidly and has been widely used in robotics research because of its flexible, open source, and extensive advantages. In scientific research, the corresponding hardware…
Exploration of unknown environments is a fundamental problem in robotics and an essential component in numerous applications of autonomous systems. A major challenge in exploring unknown environments is that the robot has to plan with the…
A robot navigating an outdoor environment with no prior knowledge of the space must rely on its local sensing to perceive its surroundings and plan. This can come in the form of a local metric map or local policy with some fixed horizon.…
For real-world deployments, it is critical to allow robots to navigate in complex environments autonomously. Traditional methods usually maintain an internal map of the environment, and then design several simple rules, in conjunction with…