Related papers: Safety Enhancement in Planetary Rovers: Early Dete…
Over eleven years into its mission, the Mars Science Laboratory remains vital to NASA's Mars exploration. Safeguarding the rover's long-term functionality is a top mission priority. In this study, we introduce and test undercomplete…
Proprioceptive sensors on planetary rovers serve for state estimation and for understanding terrain and locomotion performance. While inertial measurement units (IMUs) are widely used to this effect, force-torque sensors are less explored…
Robot mobility is critical for mission success, especially in soft or deformable terrains, where the complex wheel-soil interaction mechanics often leads to excessive wheel slip and sinkage, causing the eventual mission failure. To improve…
It is generally considered that a trustworthy autonomous planetary exploration rover must be able to operate safely and effectively within its environment. Central to trustworthy operation is the ability for the rover to recognise and…
Ensuring the safe and reliable operation of robotic systems is paramount to prevent potential disasters and safeguard human well-being. Despite rigorous design and engineering practices, these systems can still experience malfunctions,…
Navigating in off-road environments for wheeled mobile robots is challenging due to dynamic and rugged terrain. Traditional physics-based stability metrics, such as Static Stability Margin (SSM) or Zero Moment Point (ZMP) require knowledge…
End-to-end autonomous driving has made impressive progress in recent years. Existing methods usually adopt the decoupled encoder-decoder paradigm, where the encoder extracts hidden features from raw sensor data, and the decoder outputs the…
Autonomous navigation at high speeds in off-road environments necessitates robots to comprehensively understand their surroundings using onboard sensing only. The extreme conditions posed by the off-road setting can cause degraded camera…
We present an approach to enhance wheeled planetary rover dead-reckoning localization performance by leveraging the use of zero-type constraint equations in the navigation filter. Without external aiding, inertial navigation solutions…
We consider the problem of detecting, in the visual sensing data stream of an autonomous mobile robot, semantic patterns that are unusual (i.e., anomalous) with respect to the robot's previous experience in similar environments. These…
Understanding terrain topology at long-range is crucial for the success of off-road robotic missions, especially when navigating at high-speeds. LiDAR sensors, which are currently heavily relied upon for geometric mapping, provide sparse…
Wear and tear detection in fleet and shared vehicle systems is a critical challenge, particularly in rental and car-sharing services, where minor damage, such as dents, scratches, and underbody impacts, often goes unnoticed or is detected…
Sim-to-real reinforcement learning (RL) for humanoid robots with high-gear ratio actuators remains challenging due to complex actuator dynamics and the absence of torque sensors. To address this, we propose a novel RL framework leveraging…
2D top-down maps are commonly used for the navigation and exploration of mobile robots through unknown areas. Typically, the robot builds the navigation maps incrementally from local observations using onboard sensors. Recent works have…
One of the fundamental limiting factors in planetary exploration is the autonomous capabilities of planetary exploration rovers. This study proposes a novel methodology for trustworthy autonomous multi-robot teams which incorporates data…
Robot-aided exploration of planetary surfaces is essential for understanding geologic processes, yet many scientifically valuable regions, such as Martian dunes and lunar craters, remain hazardous due to loose, deformable regolith. We…
The visuomotor system of any animal is critical for its survival, and the development of a complex one within humans is large factor in our success as a species on Earth. This system is an essential part of our ability to adapt to our…
We present a novel system, AdVENTR for autonomous robot navigation in unstructured outdoor environments that consist of uneven and vegetated terrains. Our approach is general and can enable both wheeled and legged robots to handle outdoor…
Safety is paramount for mobile robotic platforms such as self-driving cars and unmanned aerial vehicles. This work is devoted to a task that is indispensable for safety yet was largely overlooked in the past -- detecting obstacles that are…
Autonomous navigation in off-road environments remains a significant challenge in field robotics, particularly for Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) tasked with search and rescue, exploration, and surveillance. Effective long-range planning…