Related papers: Challenges and Opportunities for Large-Scale Explo…
Visual navigation tasks are critical for household service robots. As these tasks become increasingly complex, effective communication and collaboration among multiple robots become imperative to ensure successful completion. In recent…
Compared with the widely investigated homogeneous multi-robot collaboration, heterogeneous robots with different capabilities can provide a more efficient and flexible collaboration for more complex tasks. In this paper, we consider a more…
We address the problem of autonomous exploration and mapping for a mobile robot using visual inputs. Exploration and mapping is a well-known and key problem in robotics, the goal of which is to enable a robot to explore a new environment…
Motivated by exploration of communication-constrained underground environments using robot teams, we study the problem of planning for intermittent connectivity in multi-agent systems. We propose a novel concept of information-consistency…
Human-guided robotic exploration is a useful approach to gathering information at remote locations, especially those that might be too risky, inhospitable, or inaccessible for humans. Maintaining common ground between the remotely-located…
Aerial robots have the potential to play a crucial role in assisting humans with complex and dangerous tasks. Nevertheless, the future industry demands innovative solutions to streamline the interaction process between humans and drones to…
Mobile robots have become indispensable for exploring hostile environments, such as in space or disaster relief scenarios, but often remain limited to teleoperation by a human operator. This restricts the deployment scale and requires…
In this work we consider a multi-robot team operating in an unknown environment where one aerial agent is tasked to map the environment and transmit (a portion of) the mapped environment to a group of ground agents that are trying to reach…
Notwithstanding the tremendous progress that is taking place in spoken language technology, effective speech-based human-robot interaction still raises a number of important challenges. Not only do the fields of robotics and spoken language…
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…
The importance of ground Mobile Robots (MRs) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) within the research community, industry, and society is growing fast. Many of these agents are nowadays equipped with communication systems that are, in some…
The problem of coordination without a priori information about the environment is important in robotics. Applications vary from formation control to search and rescue. This paper considers the problem of search by a group of solitary…
The interest in exploring planetary bodies for scientific investigation and in-situ resource utilization is ever-rising. Yet, many sites of interest are inaccessible to state-of-the-art planetary exploration robots because of the robots'…
In recent years, robots and autonomous systems have become increasingly integral to our daily lives, offering solutions to complex problems across various domains. Their application in search and rescue (SAR) operations, however, presents…
The proliferation of robots in public spaces necessitates a deeper understanding of how these robots can interact with those they share the space with. In this paper, we present findings from video analysis of publicly deployed cleaning…
Autonomous navigation in unfamiliar environments often relies on geometric mapping and planning strategies that overlook rich semantic cues such as signs, room numbers, and textual labels. We propose a novel semantic navigation framework…
The integration of foundation models (FMs) into robotics has enabled robots to understand natural language and reason about the semantics in their environments. However, existing FM-enabled robots primary operate in closed-world settings,…
Air-ground collaborative robots have shown great potential in the field of fire and rescue, which can quickly respond to rescue needs and improve the efficiency of task execution. Mapping and navigation, as the key foundation for air-ground…
Monitoring large, unknown, and complex environments with autonomous robots poses significant navigation challenges, where deploying teams of heterogeneous robots with complementary capabilities can substantially improve both mission…
Spatial search problems abound in the real world, from locating hidden nuclear or chemical sources to finding skiers after an avalanche. We exemplify the formalism and solution for spatial searches involving two agents that may or may not…