Related papers: Risk-Aware Coverage Path Planning for Lunar Micro-…
Autonomous robots navigating in off-road terrain like forests open new opportunities for automation. While off-road navigation has been studied, existing work often relies on clearly delineated pathways. We present a method allowing for…
Exploring lunar lava tubes requires robots to traverse without human intervention. Because pre-trained policies cannot fully cover all possible terrain conditions, our goal is to enable adaptive policy switching, where the robot selects an…
Robotics plays a pivotal role in planetary science and exploration, where autonomous and reliable systems are crucial due to the risks and challenges inherent to space environments. The establishment of permanent lunar bases demands robotic…
This paper investigates the mission planning problem for spacecraft confronting orbital debris to achieve autonomous avoidance. Firstly, combined with the avoidance requirements, a closed-loop framework of autonomous avoidance for orbital…
This paper presents a novel information-based mission planner for a drone tasked to monitor a spatially distributed dynamical phenomenon. For the sake of simplicity, the area to be monitored is discretized. The insight behind the proposed…
This paper proposes a state-machine model for a multi-modal, multi-robot environmental sensing algorithm. This multi-modal algorithm integrates two different exploration algorithms: (1) coverage path planning using variable formations and…
In future operations on the lunar surface, automated vehicles will be required to transport cargo between known locations. Such vehicles must be able to navigate precisely in safe regions to avoid natural hazards, human-constructed…
Despite the growing impact of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) across various industries, most of current available solutions lack for a robust autonomous navigation system to deal with the appearance of obstacles safely. This work presents…
This paper presents a communication and energy-aware multi-UAV Coverage Path Planning (mCPP) method for scenarios requiring continuous inter-UAV communication, such as cooperative search and rescue and surveillance missions. Unlike existing…
Future urban transportation concepts include a mixture of ground and air vehicles with varying degrees of autonomy in a congested environment. In such dynamic environments, occupancy maps alone are not sufficient for safe path planning.…
We present an approach to enhance wheeled planetary rover dead-reckoning localization performance by leveraging the use of zero-type constraint equations in the navigation filter. Without external aiding, inertial navigation solutions…
Space exploration missions have seen use of increasingly sophisticated robotic systems with ever more autonomy. Deep learning promises to take this even a step further, and has applications for high-level tasks, like path planning, as well…
Autonomous navigation in unstructured environments requires robots to assess terrain difficulty in real-time and plan paths that balance efficiency with safety. This thesis presents a traversability-aware navigation framework for the M4…
Safely landing on the lunar surface is a challenging task, especially in the heavily-shadowed South Pole region where traditional vision-based hazard detection methods are not reliable. The potential existence of valuable resources at the…
We present MLNav, a learning-enhanced path planning framework for safety-critical and resource-limited systems operating in complex environments, such as rovers navigating on Mars. MLNav makes judicious use of machine learning to enhance…
We propose an algorithm to (i) learn online a deep signed distance function (SDF) with a LiDAR-equipped robot to represent the 3D environment geometry, and (ii) plan collision-free trajectories given this deep learned map. Our algorithm…
Exploration of terrestrial planets such as Mars are conducted using orbiters, landers and rovers. Cameras and instruments onboard orbiters have enabled global mapping of Mars at low spatial resolution. Landers and rovers such as the Mars…
Autonomous robotic inspection missions require balancing multiple conflicting objectives while navigating near costly obstacles. Current multi-objective path planning (MOPP) methods struggle to adapt to evolving risks like localization…
Visual exploration and smart data collection via autonomous vehicles is an attractive topic in various disciplines. Disturbances like wind significantly influence both the power consumption of the flying robots and the performance of the…
This paper proposes a solution to the problem of smooth path planning for mobile robots in dynamic and unknown environments. A novel concept of Time-Warped Grid is introduced to predict the pose of obstacles in the environment and avoid…