Related papers: Soil Sample Search in Partially Observable Environ…
Utilizing robots for autonomous target search in complex and unknown environments can greatly improve the efficiency of search and rescue missions. However, existing methods have shown inadequate performance due to hardware platform…
A framework is introduced for planning unmanned aerial vehicle flight paths for visual surveillance of ground targets, each having particular viewing requirements. Specifically, each target is associated with a set of imaging parameters,…
Using the spatial structure of various indoor environments as prior knowledge, the robot would construct the map more efficiently. Autonomous mobile robots generally apply simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) methods to understand…
By utilizing only depth information, the paper introduces a novel but efficient local planning approach that enhances not only computational efficiency but also planning performances for memoryless local planners. The sampling is first…
Terrain geometry is, in general, non-smooth, non-linear, non-convex, and, if perceived through a robot-centric visual unit, appears partially occluded and noisy. This work presents the complete control pipeline capable of handling the…
Moving objects to find a fully-occluded target object, known as mechanical search, is a challenging problem in robotics. As objects are often organized semantically, we conjecture that semantic information about object relationships can…
Local search is a fundamental method in operations research and combinatorial optimisation. It has been widely applied to a variety of challenging problems, including multi-objective optimisation where multiple, often conflicting,…
Scientists interested in studying natural phenomena often take physical specimens from locations in the environment for later analysis. These analysis locations are typically specified by expert heuristics. Instead, we propose to choose…
This paper tackles the problem of integrated task and kinodynamic motion planning in uncertain environments. We consider a robot with nonlinear dynamics tasked with a Linear Temporal Logic over finite traces ($\ltlf$) specification…
For autonomous robots navigating in urban environments, it is important for the robot to stay on the designated path of travel (i.e., the footpath), and avoid areas such as grass and garden beds, for safety and social conformity…
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with continuous state and observation spaces have powerful flexibility for representing real-world decision and control problems but are notoriously difficult to solve. Recent online…
Adaptive sampling theory has shown that, with proper assumptions on the signal class, algorithms exist to reconstruct a signal in $\mathbb{R}^{d}$ with an optimal number of samples. We generalize this problem to the case of spatial signals,…
Active search, in applications like environment monitoring or disaster response missions, involves autonomous agents detecting targets in a search space using decision making algorithms that adapt to the history of their observations.…
Among the abilities that autonomous mobile robots should exhibit, map building and localization are definitely recognized as fundamental. Consequently, countless algorithms for solving the Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM)…
We present PLUMES, a planner to localizing and collecting samples at the global maximum of an a priori unknown and partially observable continuous environment. The "maximum-seek-and-sample" (MSS) problem is pervasive in the environmental…
Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are increasingly used to survey coral reefs, yet efficiently locating specific coral species of interest remains difficult: target species are often sparsely distributed across the reef, and an AUV with…
Future collaborative robots must be capable of finding objects. As such a fundamental skill, we expect object search to eventually become an off-the-shelf capability for any robot, similar to e.g., object detection, SLAM, and motion…
Autonomous exploration is a widely studied fundamental application in the field of quadrotors, which requires them to automatically explore unknown space to obtain complete information about the environment. The frontier-based method, which…
Autonomous systems can be used to search for sparse signals in a large space; e.g., aerial robots can be deployed to localize threats, detect gas leaks, or respond to distress calls. Intuitively, search algorithms may increase efficiency by…
Survey sampling plays an important role in the efficient allocation and management of resources. The essence of survey sampling lies in acquiring a sample of data points from a population and subsequently using this sample to estimate the…