Related papers: ALPINE: a climbing robot for operations in mountai…
Solving mobile manipulation tasks in inaccessible and dangerous environments is an important application of robots to support humans. Example domains are construction and maintenance of manned and unmanned stations on the moon and other…
The quality of the visual feedback can vary significantly on a legged robot that is meant to traverse unknown and unstructured terrains. The map of the environment, acquired with online state-of-the-art algorithms, often degrades after a…
Teams of mobile [aerial, ground, or aquatic] robots have applications in resource delivery, patrolling, information-gathering, agriculture, forest fire fighting, chemical plume source localization and mapping, and search-and-rescue. Robot…
A remote collaboration setup allows an expert to instruct a remotely located novice user to help them with a task. Advanced solutions exist in the field of remote guidance and telemanipulation, however, we lack a device that combines these…
Assistive robot manipulators must be able to autonomously pick and place a wide range of novel objects to be truly useful. However, current assistive robots lack this capability. Additionally, assistive systems need to have an interface…
In recent years, robotic exploration has become increasingly important in planetary exploration. One area of particular interest for exploration is Martian lava tubes, which have several distinct features of interest. First, it is theorized…
The long-standing, dominant approach to robotic obstacle negotiation relies on mapping environmental geometry to avoid obstacles. However, this approach does not allow for traversal of cluttered obstacles, hindering applications such as…
Building structures can allow a robot to surmount large obstacles, expanding the set of areas it can reach. This paper presents a planning algorithm to automatically determine what structures a construction-capable robot must build in order…
In this paper, we focus on the kangaroo, which has powerful legs capable of jumping and a soft and strong tail. To incorporate these unique structure into a robot for utilization, we propose a design method that takes into account both the…
The paper proposes a reliable and robust planning solution to the long range robotic navigation problem in extremely cluttered environments. A two-layer planning architecture is proposed that leverages both the environment map and the…
Missions such as the Ingenuity helicopter have shown the advantages of using novel locomotion modes to increase the scientific return of planetary exploration missions. Legged robots can further expand the reach and capability of future…
Environments with large terrain height variations present great challenges for legged robot locomotion. Drawing inspiration from fire ants' collective assembly behavior, we study strategies that can enable two ``connectable'' robots to…
A robotic platform for mobile manipulation needs to satisfy two contradicting requirements for many real-world applications: A compact base is required to navigate through cluttered indoor environments, while the support needs to be large…
This paper introduces a new method for robot motion planning and navigation in uneven environments through a surfel representation of underlying point clouds. The proposed method addresses the shortcomings of state-of-the-art navigation…
Socially-aware robotic navigation is essential in environments where humans and robots coexist, ensuring both safety and comfort. However, most existing approaches have been primarily developed for mobile robots, leaving a significant gap…
Humanoid locomotion has advanced rapidly with deep reinforcement learning (DRL), enabling robust feet-based traversal over uneven terrain. Yet platforms beyond leg length remain largely out of reach because current RL training paradigms…
This paper presents visual and 3D structure inspection for steel structures and bridges using a developed climbing robot. The robot can move freely on a steel surface, carry sensors, collect data and then send to the ground station in real…
We study a human-robot collaborative transportation task in presence of obstacles. The task for each agent is to carry a rigid object to a common target position, while safely avoiding obstacles and satisfying the compliance and actuation…
Multi-robot exploration is a field which tackles the challenge of exploring a previously unknown environment with a number of robots. This is especially relevant for search and rescue operations where time is essential. Current state of the…
Robots are increasingly entering uncertain and unstructured environments. Within these, robots are bound to face unexpected external disturbances like accidental human or tool collisions. Robots must develop the capacity to respond to…