Related papers: Context-Aware Replanning with Pre-explored Semanti…
Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promise for robot control, but their dependence on action supervision limits scalability and generalization. To address this challenge, we introduce CARE, a novel framework…
Building deep reinforcement learning agents that can generalize and adapt to unseen environments remains a fundamental challenge for AI. This paper describes progresses on this challenge in the context of man-made environments, which are…
The deployment of autonomous service robots in human-centric environments is hindered by a critical gap in perception and planning. Traditional navigation systems rely on expensive LiDARs that, while geometrically precise, are semantically…
Visual navigation in unknown environments based solely on natural language descriptions is a key capability for intelligent robots. In this work, we propose a navigation framework built upon off-the-shelf Visual Language Models (VLMs),…
Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with context fidelity, producing inconsistent answers when responding to questions based on provided information. Existing approaches either rely on expensive supervised fine-tuning to generate…
Extracting commonsense knowledge from a large language model (LLM) offers a path to designing intelligent robots. Existing approaches that leverage LLMs for planning are unable to recover when an action fails and often resort to retrying…
This paper addresses the problem of object-goal navigation in autonomous inspections in real-world environments. Object-goal navigation is crucial to enable effective inspections in various settings, often requiring the robot to identify…
One of the key challenges in the semantic mapping problem in postdisaster environments is how to analyze a large amount of data efficiently with minimal supervision. To address this challenge, we propose a deep learning-based semantic…
Mobile robots are often tasked with repeatedly navigating through an environment whose traversability changes over time. These changes may exhibit some hidden structure, which can be learned. Many studies consider reactive algorithms for…
We present a novel high-level planning framework that leverages vision-language models (VLMs) to improve autonomous navigation in unknown indoor environments with many dead ends. Traditional exploration methods often take inefficient routes…
An embodied task such as embodied question answering (EmbodiedQA), requires an agent to explore the environment and collect clues to answer a given question that related with specific objects in the scene. The solution of such task usually…
This paper presents a system for autonomous semantic exploration and dense semantic target mapping of a complex unknown environment using a ground robot equipped with a LiDAR-panoramic camera suite. Existing approaches often struggle to…
Semantic object mapping in uncertain, perceptually degraded environments during long-range multi-robot autonomous exploration tasks such as search-and-rescue is important and challenging. During such missions, high recall is desirable to…
Training-free Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) agents powered by foundation models can follow instructions and explore 3D environments. However, existing approaches rely on greedy frontier selection and passive spatial memory, leading to…
To autonomously navigate in real-world environments, special in search and rescue operations, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) necessitate comprehensive maps to ensure safety. However, the prevalent metric map often lacks semantic…
We introduce DualMap, an online open-vocabulary mapping system that enables robots to understand and navigate dynamically changing environments through natural language queries. Designed for efficient semantic mapping and adaptability to…
Robots deployed in real-world environments, such as homes, must not only navigate safely but also understand their surroundings and adapt to changes in the environment. To perform tasks efficiently, they must build and maintain a semantic…
This article presents a family of Stochastic Cartographic Occupancy Prediction Engines (SCOPEs) that enable mobile robots to predict the future states of complex dynamic environments. They do this by accounting for the motion of the robot…
Reliable and accurate localization and mapping are key components of most autonomous systems. Besides geometric information about the mapped environment, the semantics plays an important role to enable intelligent navigation behaviors. In…
Robots are increasingly operating in open-world environments where safe behavior depends on context: the same hallway may require different navigation strategies when crowded versus empty, or during an emergency versus normal operations.…