Related papers: FALCON: Fast Autonomous Aerial Exploration using C…
Autonomous vehicles such as the Mars rovers currently lead the vanguard of surface exploration on extraterrestrial planets and moons. In order to accelerate the pace of exploration and science objectives, it is critical to plan safe and…
In recent years, advancements have been made towards the goal of using chaotic coverage path planners for autonomous search and traversal of spaces with limited environmental cues. However, the state of this field is still in its infancy as…
Exploration is a fundamental problem in robot autonomy. A major limitation, however, is that during exploration robots oftentimes have to rely on on-board systems alone for state estimation, accumulating significant drift over time in large…
Quadrotors hold significant promise for several applications such as agriculture, search and rescue, and infrastructure inspection. Achieving autonomous operation requires systems to navigate safely through complex and unfamiliar…
This paper contributes a novel strategy for semantics-aware autonomous exploration and inspection path planning. Attuned to the fact that environments that need to be explored often involve a sparse set of semantic entities of particular…
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…
Safe swarm navigation in cluttered indoor environment requires long-horizon planning, reactive obstacle avoidance, and adaptive compliance. We propose ImpedanceDiffusion, a hierarchical framework that leverages image-conditioned…
Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used for exploration-driven monitoring in hazardous environments such as disaster zones, contaminated sites, wildfire areas, and damaged infrastructure, where limited flight endurance must be…
Exploration of unknown environments is crucial for autonomous robots; it allows them to actively reason and decide on what new data to acquire for different tasks, such as mapping, object discovery, and environmental assessment. Existing…
Despite extensive developments in motion planning of autonomous aerial vehicles (AAVs), existing frameworks faces the challenges of local minima and deadlock in complex dynamic environments, leading to increased collision risks. To address…
This paper presents the development and evaluation of an optimization-based autonomous trajectory planning algorithm for the asteroid reconnaissance phase of a deep-space exploration mission. The reconnaissance phase is a low-altitude flyby…
Many environments, such as unvisited planetary surfaces and oceanic regions, remain unexplored due to a lack of prior knowledge. Autonomous vehicles must sample upon arrival, process data, and either transmit findings to a teleoperator or…
A hybrid map representation, which consists of a modified generalized Voronoi Diagram (GVD)-based topological map and a grid-based metric map, is proposed to facilitate a new frontier-driven exploration strategy. Exploration frontiers are…
Tunnel construction using the drill-and-blast method requires the 3D measurement of the excavation front to evaluate underbreak locations. Considering the inspection and measurement task's safety, cost, and efficiency, deploying lightweight…
Autonomous robots exploring unknown environments face a significant challenge: navigating effectively without prior maps and with limited external feedback. This challenge intensifies in sparse reward environments, where traditional…
Currently, state-of-the-art exploration methods maintain high-resolution map representations in order to optimize exploration goals in each step that maximizes information gain. However, during exploring, those "optimal" selections could…
Autonomous UAV path planning for 3D reconstruction has been actively studied in various applications for high-quality 3D models. However, most existing works have adopted explore-then-exploit, prior-based or exploration-based strategies,…
Autonomous 3D environment exploration is a fundamental task for various applications such as navigation. The goal of exploration is to investigate a new environment and build its occupancy map efficiently. In this paper, we propose a new…
Proper path planning is the first step of robust and efficient autonomous navigation for mobile robots. Meanwhile, it is still challenging for robots to work in a complex environment without complete prior information. This paper presents…
An important capability of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is autonomous landing while avoiding collision with obstacles in the process. Such capability requires real-time local trajectory planning. Although trajectory-planning…