Related papers: Equivalent Environments and Covering Spaces for Ro…
Robot learning provides a number of ways to teach robots simple skills, such as grasping. However, these skills are usually trained in open, clutter-free environments, and therefore would likely cause undesirable collisions in more complex,…
We present the concept of speed maps: speed limits for mobile robots in human environments. Static speed maps allow for faster navigation on corridors while limiting the speed around corners and in rooms. Dynamic speed maps put limits on…
Collective decision-making is an essential capability of large-scale multi-robot systems to establish autonomy on the swarm level. A large portion of literature on collective decision-making in swarm robotics focuses on discrete decisions…
Passive deformation due to compliance is a commonly used benefit of soft robots, providing opportunities to achieve robust actuation with few active degrees of freedom. Soft growing robots in particular have shown promise in navigation of…
Gender is a primary characteristic by which people organize themselves. Previous research has shown that people tend to unknowingly ascribe gender to robots based on features of their embodiment. Yet, robots are not necessarily ascribed the…
We introduce an information measure, termed clarity, motivated by information entropy, and show that it has intuitive properties relevant to dynamic coverage control and informative path planning. Clarity defines the quality of the…
Localization, that is the estimation of a robot's location from sensor data, is a fundamental problem in mobile robotics. This papers presents a version of Markov localization which provides accurate position estimates and which is tailored…
In order for robots to autonomously navigate and operate in diverse environments, it is essential for them to recognize the state of their environment. On the other hand, the environmental state recognition has traditionally involved…
This paper presents a simultaneous localization and map-assisted environment recognition (SLAMER) method. Mobile robots usually have an environment map and environment information can be assigned to the map. Important information for mobile…
Human environments contain numerous objects configured in a variety of arrangements. Our goal is to enable robots to repose previously unseen objects according to learned semantic relationships in novel environments. We break this problem…
Machine learning has achieved remarkable success in many applications. However, existing studies are largely based on the closed-world assumption, which assumes that the environment is stationary, and the model is fixed once deployed. In…
In the pattern formation problem, robots in a system must self-coordinate to form a given pattern, regardless of translation, rotation, uniform-scaling, and/or reflection. In other words, a valid final configuration of the system is a…
This paper presents a distributed approach for exploring and triangulating an unknown region using a multi- robot system. The objective is to produce a covering of an unknown workspace by a fixed number of robots such that the covered…
Using mobile robots for autonomous patrolling of environments to prevent intrusions is a topic of increasing practical relevance. One of the most challenging scientific issues is the problem of finding effective patrolling strategies that,…
Living organisms interact with their surroundings in a closed-loop fashion, where sensory inputs dictate the initiation and termination of behaviours. Even simple animals are able to develop and execute complex plans, which has not yet been…
Continuum soft robots are mechanical systems entirely made of continuously deformable elements. This design solution aims to bring robots closer to invertebrate animals and soft appendices of vertebrate animals (e.g., an elephant's trunk, a…
The popularity of mobile robots has been steadily growing, with these robots being increasingly utilized to execute tasks previously completed by human workers. For bipedal robots to see this same success, robust autonomous navigation…
Two regimes permitting safe physical human-robot interaction, speed and separation monitoring and safety-rated monitored stop, depend on reliable perception of the space surrounding the robot. This can be accomplished by visual sensors…
The emerging behaviors of swarms have fascinated scientists and gathered significant interest in the field of robotics. Traditionally, swarms are viewed as egalitarian, with robots sharing identical roles and capabilities. However, recent…
Autonomous cleaning robots for public spaces have potential for addressing current societal challenges, such as labor shortages and cleanliness in public spaces. Other application domains like autonomous driving, bin picking, or search and…