Related papers: Soil Sample Search in Partially Observable Environ…

Many automated manufacturing processes rely on industrial robot arms to move process-specific tools along workpiece surfaces. In applications like grinding, sanding, spray painting, or inspection, they need to cover a workpiece fully while…

This paper presents a distributed scalable multi-robot planning algorithm for informed sampling of quasistatic spatial fields. We address the problem of efficient data collection using multiple autonomous vehicles and consider the effects…

Robotic mapping is useful in scientific applications that involve surveying unstructured environments. This paper presents a target-oriented mapping system for sparsely distributed geologic surface features, such as precariously balanced…

We present an active visual search model for finding objects in unknown environments. The proposed algorithm guides the robot towards the sought object using the relevant stimuli provided by the visual sensors. Existing search strategies…

Mobile robots rely on maps to navigate through an environment. In the absence of any map, the robots must build the map online from partial observations as they move in the environment. Traditional methods build a map using only direct…

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…

Autonomous exploration in dynamic environments necessitates a planner that can proactively respond to changes and make efficient and safe decisions for robots. Although plenty of sampling-based works have shown success in exploring static…

This paper presents a strategy to guide a mobile ground robot equipped with a camera or depth sensor, in order to autonomously map the visible part of a bounded three-dimensional structure. We describe motion planning algorithms that…

Agricultural robotics is an active research area due to global population growth and expectations of food and labor shortages. Robots can potentially help with tasks such as pruning, harvesting, phenotyping, and plant modeling. However,…

We address the problem of controlling a mobile robot to explore a partially known environment. The robot's objective is the maximization of the amount of information collected about the environment. We formulate the problem as a partially…

Soil moisture monitoring is a fundamental process to enhance agricultural outcomes and to protect the environment. The traditional methods for measuring moisture content in soil are laborious and expensive, and therefore there is a growing…

Determining the position and orientation of a sensor vis-a-vis its surrounding, while simultaneously mapping the environment around that sensor or simultaneous localization and mapping is quickly becoming an important advancement in…

While visual SLAM systems are well studied and achieve impressive results in indoor and urban settings, natural, outdoor and open-field environments are much less explored and still present relevant research challenges. Visual navigation…

We consider exploration tasks in which an autonomous mobile robot incrementally builds maps of initially unknown indoor environments. In such tasks, the robot makes a sequence of decisions on where to move next that, usually, are based on…

Spatial sampling is traditionally studied in a static setting where static sensors scattered around space take measurements of the spatial field at their locations. In this paper we study the emerging paradigm of sampling and reconstructing…

Search heuristics, particularly those that are evaluation-driven (e.g., evolutionary computation), are often performed in simulation, enabling exploration of large solution spaces. Yet simulation may not truly replicate real-world…

In both industrial and service domains, a central benefit of the use of robots is their ability to quickly and reliably execute repetitive tasks. However, even relatively simple peg-in-hole tasks are typically subject to stochastic…

Autonomous technology, which has become widespread today, appears in many different configurations such as mobile robots, manipulators, and drones. One of the most important tasks of these vehicles during autonomous operations is path…

We present a novel LLM-informed model-based planning framework, and a novel prompt selection method, for object search in partially-known environments. Our approach uses an LLM to estimate statistics about the likelihood of finding the…

Recent advancements in robotics have transformed industries such as manufacturing, logistics, surgery, and planetary exploration. A key challenge is developing efficient motion planning algorithms that allow robots to navigate complex…