Related papers: Fish-inspired tracking of underwater turbulent plu…
Objects moving in fluids experience patterns of stress on their surfaces determined by their motion and the geometry of nearby boundaries. Fish and underwater robots can use these patterns for navigation. This paper extends this…
Navigating efficiently across vortical flow fields presents a significant challenge in various robotic applications. The dynamic and unsteady nature of vortical flows often disturbs the control of underwater robots, complicating their…
Efficient point-to-point navigation in the presence of a background flow field is important for robotic applications such as ocean surveying. In such applications, robots may only have knowledge of their immediate surroundings or be faced…
Fish use their lateral lines to sense flows and pressure gradients, enabling them to detect nearby objects and organisms. Towards replicating this capability, we demonstrated successful leader-follower formation swimming using flow pressure…
Many aquatic organisms are able to track ambient flow disturbances and locate their source. These tasks are particularly challenging because they require the organism to sense local flow information and respond accordingly. Details of how…
Some female moths attract male moths by emitting series of pulses of pheromone filaments propagating downwind. The turbulent nature of the wind creates a complex flow environment, and causes the filaments to propagate in the form of patches…
Aerial operation in turbulent environments is a challenging problem due to the chaotic behavior of the flow. This problem is made even more complex when a team of aerial robots is trying to achieve coordinated motion in turbulent wind…
Smart active particles can acquire some limited knowledge of the fluid environment from simple mechanical cues and exert a control on their preferred steering direction. Their goal is to learn the best way to navigate by exploiting the…
Advancements in onboard computing mean remote sensing agents can employ state-of-the-art computer vision and machine learning at the edge. These capabilities can be leveraged to unlock new rare, transient, and pinpoint measurements of…
Autonomous shipping has recently gained much interest in the research community. However, little research focuses on inland - and port navigation, even though this is identified by countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands as an…
Effective robot navigation in unseen environments is a challenging task that requires precise control actions at high frequencies. Recent advances have framed it as an image-goal-conditioned control problem, where the robot generates…
Robots such as autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) have been used for sensing and monitoring aquatic environments such as oceans and lakes. Environmental sampling is a challenging task because the…
Exploring bodies of water on their surface allows robots to efficiently communicate and harvest energy from the sun. On the water surface, however, robots often face highly unstructured environments, cluttered with plant matter, animals,…
Many different robots have been designed and built to work under water. In many cases, researchers have chosen to use bio-inspired platforms. In most cases, the main goal of the fish inspired robots has been set to autonomously swim and…
This thesis presents a solution that enables aerial robots to reason about surrounding wind flow fields in real time using on board sensors and embedded flight hardware. The core novelty of this research is the fusion of range measurements…
We present theoretical and numerical results concerning the problem to find the path that minimizes the time to navigate between two given points in a complex fluid under realistic navigation constraints. We contrast deterministic Optimal…
We present Nav2Goal, a data-efficient and end-to-end learning method for goal-conditioned visual navigation. Our technique is used to train a navigation policy that enables a robot to navigate close to sparse geographic waypoints provided…
We present a flow-based control strategy that enables resource-constrained marine robots to patrol gyre-like flow environments on an orbital trajectory with a periodicity in a given range. The controller does not require a detailed model of…
This research develops a novel sensor for aquatic robots inspired by the whiskers of harbor seals. This sensor can detect the movement of water, offering valuable data on speed, currents, barriers, and water disturbance. It employs a…
Continual learning in robotics seeks systems that can constantly adapt to changing environments and tasks, mirroring human adaptability. A key challenge is refining dynamics models, essential for planning and control, while addressing…