Related papers: TOP-Nav: Legged Navigation Integrating Terrain, Ob…
Legged robots can traverse a wide variety of terrains, some of which may be challenging for wheeled robots, such as stairs or highly uneven surfaces. However, quadruped robots face stability challenges on slippery surfaces. This can be…
Obstacle avoidance and path planning are essential for guiding unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) through environments that are densely populated with dynamic obstacles. This paper develops a novel approach that combines tangentbased path…
As both legged robots and embedded compute have become more capable, researchers have started to focus on field deployment of these robots. Robust autonomy in unstructured environments requires perception of the world around the robot in…
Legged robots, particularly quadrupeds, offer promising navigation capabilities, especially in scenarios requiring traversal over diverse terrains and obstacle avoidance. This paper addresses the challenge of enabling legged robots to…
Legged robot navigation in extreme environments can hinder the use of cameras and laser scanners due to darkness, air obfuscation or sensor damage. In these conditions, proprioceptive sensing will continue to work reliably. In this paper,…
Recent advances in legged locomotion learning are still dominated by the utilization of geometric representations of the environment, limiting the robot's capability to respond to higher-level semantics such as human instructions. To…
Legged robots have the ability to adapt their walking posture to navigate confined spaces due to their high degrees of freedom. However, this has not been exploited in most common multilegged platforms. This paper presents a deformable…
Agile locomotion in complex 3D environments requires robust spatial awareness to safely avoid diverse obstacles such as aerial clutter, uneven terrain, and dynamic agents. Depth-based perception approaches often struggle with sensor noise,…
Inspired by human behavior when traveling over unknown terrain, this study proposes the use of probing strategies and integrates them into a traversability analysis framework to address safe navigation on unknown rough terrain. Our…
The challenge of traversability estimation is a crucial aspect of autonomous navigation in unstructured outdoor environments such as forests. It involves determining whether certain areas are passable or risky for robots, taking into…
Terrain geometry is, in general, non-smooth, non-linear, non-convex, and, if perceived through a robot-centric visual unit, appears partially occluded and noisy. This work presents the complete control pipeline capable of handling the…
Robot navigation traditionally relies on building an explicit map that is used to plan collision-free trajectories to a desired target. In deformable, complex terrain, using geometric-based approaches can fail to find a path due to…
Collapsing terrains, often present in search and rescue missions or planetary exploration, pose significant challenges for quadruped robots. This paper introduces a robust locomotion framework for safe navigation over unstable surfaces by…
Deformable granular terrains introduce significant locomotion and immobilization risks in planetary exploration and are difficult to detect via remote sensing (e.g., vision). Legged robots can sense terrain properties through leg-terrain…
This paper contributes a novel and modularized learning-based method for aerial robots navigating cluttered environments containing hard-to-perceive thin obstacles without assuming access to a map or the full pose estimation of the robot.…
Autonomous navigation at high speeds in off-road environments necessitates robots to comprehensively understand their surroundings using onboard sensing only. The extreme conditions posed by the off-road setting can cause degraded camera…
Legged robots are physically capable of navigating a diverse variety of environments and overcoming a wide range of obstructions. For example, in a search and rescue mission, a legged robot could climb over debris, crawl through gaps, and…
Motion planning and obstacle avoidance is a key challenge in robotics applications. While previous work succeeds to provide excellent solutions for known environments, sensor-based motion planning in new and dynamic environments remains…
Autonomous navigation in extreme mountainous terrains poses challenges due to the presence of mobility-stressing elements and undulating surfaces, making it particularly difficult compared to conventional off-road driving scenarios. In such…
Trajectory planning in unstructured environments is a fundamental and challenging capability for mobile robots. Traditional modular pipelines suffer from latency and cascading errors across perception, localization, mapping, and planning…