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Related papers: Stein Variational Ergodic Search

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Planning informative trajectories while considering the spatial distribution of the information over the environment, as well as constraints such as the robot's limited battery capacity, makes the long-time horizon persistent coverage…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Kaleb Ben Naveed , Devansh Agrawal , Christopher Vermillion , Dimitra Panagou

Many core problems in robotics can be framed as constrained optimization problems. Often on these problems, the robotic system has uncertainty, or it would be advantageous to identify multiple high quality feasible solutions. To enable…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Griffin Tabor , Tucker Hermans

Surveillance and exploration of large environments is a tedious task. In spaces with limited environmental cues, random-like search is an effective approach as it allows the robot to perform online coverage of environments using simple…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Karan Sridharan , Patrick McNamee , Zahra Nili Ahmadabadi , Jeffrey Hudack

This paper presents a whole-body robot control method for exploring and probing a given region of interest. The ergodic control formalism behind such an exploration behavior consists of matching the time-averaged statistics of a robot…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Cem Bilaloglu , Tobias Löw , Sylvain Calinon

Ergodic search enables optimal exploration of an information distribution while guaranteeing the asymptotic coverage of the search space. However, current methods typically have exponential computation complexity in the search space…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Max Muchen Sun , Ayush Gaggar , Peter Trautman , Todd Murphey

In this work, we consider the problem of multi-agent informative path planning (IPP) for robots whose sensor visibility continuously changes as a consequence of a time-varying natural phenomenon. We leverage ergodic trajectory optimization…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Elena Wittemyer , Ananya Rao , Ian Abraham , Howie Choset

Ergodic control synthesizes optimal coverage behaviors over spatial distributions for nonlinear systems. However, existing formulations model the robot as a non-volumetric point, whereas in practice a robot interacts with the environment…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Jueun Kwon , Max M. Sun , Todd Murphey

This work presents a 3D multi-robot exploration framework for a team of UGVs moving on uneven terrains. The framework was designed by casting the two-level coordination strategy presented in [1] into the context of multi-robot exploration.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-10 Luigi Freda , Tiago Novo , David Portugal , Rui P. Rocha

We present a method for image-guided exploration for mobile robotic systems. Our approach extends ergodic exploration methods, a recent exploration approach that prioritizes complete coverage of a space, with the use of a learned image…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Elena Wittemyer , Ian Abraham

In this paper, we conduct a literature review of laws of motion based on stochastic search strategies which are mainly focused on exploring highly dynamic environments. In this regard, stochastic search strategies represent an interesting…

Recent methods in ergodic coverage planning have shown promise as tools that can adapt to a wide range of geometric coverage problems with general constraints, but are highly sensitive to the numerical scaling of the problem space. The…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Yanis Lahrach , Christian Hughes , Ian Abraham

Path planning for robotic coverage is the task of determining a collision-free robot trajectory that observes all points of interest in an environment. Robots employed for such tasks are often capable of exercising active control over…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-17 Tushar Kusnur , Dhruv Mauria Saxena , Maxim Likhachev

Autonomous robotic search has important applications in robotics, such as the search for signs of life after a disaster. When \emph{a priori} information is available, for example in the form of a distribution, a planner can use that…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Albert Xu , Bhaskar Vundurthy , Geordan Gutow , Ian Abraham , Jeff Schneider , Howie Choset

Ergodic exploration has spawned a lot of interest in mobile robotics due to its ability to design time trajectories that match desired spatial coverage statistics. However, current ergodic approaches are for continuous spaces, which require…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Benjamin Wong , Ryan H. Lee , Tyler M. Paine , Santosh Devasia , Ashis G. Banerjee

Autonomous robots are increasingly deployed for long-term information-gathering tasks, which pose two key challenges: planning informative trajectories in environments that evolve across space and time, and ensuring persistent operation…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Kaleb Ben Naveed , Devansh R. Agrawal , Rahul Kumar , Dimitra Panagou

In large unknown environments, search operations can be much more time-efficient with the use of multi-robot fleets by parallelizing efforts. This means robots must efficiently perform collaborative mapping (exploration) while…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Indraneel Patil , Rachel Zheng , Charvi Gupta , Jaekyung Song , Narendar Sriram , Katia Sycara

Motion Planning is necessary for robots to complete different tasks. Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) and its variants have been widely used in robot motion planning due to their fast search in state space. However, they perform not well…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-05-19 Zhirui Sun , Jiankun Wang , Max Q. -H. Meng

This work presents a fully integrated tree-based combined exploration-planning algorithm: Exploration-RRT (ERRT). The algorithm is focused on providing real-time solutions for local exploration in a fully unknown and unstructured…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Björn Lindqvist , Akash Patel , Kalle Löfgren , George Nikolakopoulos

This paper addresses an Optimal Transport (OT)-based efficient multi-robot exploration problem, considering the energy constraints of a multi-robot system. The efficiency in this problem implies how a team of robots (agents) covers a given…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-09-03 Rabiul Hasan Kabir , Kooktae Lee

Visual observation of objects is essential for many robotic applications, such as object reconstruction and manipulation, navigation, and scene understanding. Machine learning algorithms constitute the state-of-the-art in many fields but…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-31 Heiko Renz , Maximilian Krämer , Frank Hoffmann , Torsten Bertram