Related papers: Exploring Unstructured Environments using Minimal …
Swarms of drones are being more and more used in many practical scenarios, such as surveillance, environmental monitoring, search and rescue in hardly-accessible areas, etc.. While a single drone can be guided by a human operator, the…
Perception is necessary for autonomous navigation in an unknown area crowded with obstacles. It's challenging for a robot to navigate safely without any sensors that can sense the environment, resulting in a $\textit{blind}$ robot, and…
Autonomous navigation in unknown environments with obstacles remains challenging for micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) due to their limited onboard computing and sensing resources. Although various collision avoidance methods have been…
Smart City applications, such as traffic monitoring and disaster response, often use swarms of intelligent and cooperative drones to efficiently collect sensor data over different areas of interest and time spans. However, when the required…
Searching in a denied environment is challenging for swarm robots as no assistance from GNSS, mapping, data sharing, and central processing is allowed. However, using olfactory and auditory signals to cooperate like animals could be an…
This letter presents a complete framework Meeting-Merging-Mission for multi-robot exploration under communication restriction. Considering communication is limited in both bandwidth and range in the real world, we propose a lightweight…
In this paper we propose a planner for 3D exploration that is suitable for applications using state-of-the-art 3D sensors such as lidars, which produce large point clouds with each scan. The planner is based on the detection of a frontier -…
Collaborative navigation of heterogeneous robots in unknown environments poses significant challenges due to sensing, communication, and computational limitations. In this work, a lead robot navigates toward a target while a mobile sensor…
Autonomous exploration of unknown space is an essential component for the deployment of mobile robots in the real world. Safe navigation is crucial for all robotics applications and requires accurate and consistent maps of the robot's…
Experiments using large numbers of miniature swarm robots are desirable to teach, study, and test multi-robot and swarm intelligence algorithms and their applications. To realize the full potential of a swarm robot, it should be capable of…
This paper introduces a testbed to study distributed sensing problems of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) exhibiting swarm intelligence. Several Smart City applications, such as transport and disaster response, require efficient collection…
Lightweight aerial swarms have potential applications in scenarios where larger drones fail to operate efficiently. The primary foundation for lightweight aerial swarms is efficient relative localization, which enables cooperation and…
Active perception is a fundamental problem in autonomous robotics in which the robot must decide where to move and what to sense in order to obtain the most informative observations for accomplishing its mission. Existing approaches either…
Swarm foraging is a common test case application for multi-robot systems. In this paper we present a novel algorithm for controlling swarm robots with limited communication range and storage capacity to efficiently search for and retrieve…
This systems paper presents the implementation and design of RB5, a wheeled robot for autonomous long-term exploration with fewer and cheaper sensors. Requiring just an RGB-D camera and low-power computing hardware, the system consists of…
Heterogeneous teams of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can enhance the exploration capabilities of aerial robots by exploiting different strengths and abilities of varying UAVs. This paper presents a novel method for exploring unknown…
Perceiving and mapping the surroundings are essential for enabling autonomous navigation in any robotic platform. The algorithm class that enables accurate mapping while correcting the odometry errors present in most robotics systems is…
The rapid deployment of drones poses significant challenges for airspace management, security, and surveillance. Current detection and classification technologies, including cameras, LiDAR, and conventional radar systems, often struggle to…
In this paper, we address the problem of safe trajectory planning for autonomous search and exploration in constrained, cluttered environments. Guaranteeing safe (collision-free) trajectories is a challenging problem that has garnered…
In unknown non-convex environments, such as indoor and underground spaces, deploying a fleet of robots to explore the surroundings while simultaneously searching for and tracking targets of interest to maintain high-precision data…