Related papers: Learning a Terrain- and Robot-Aware Dynamics Model…
The equations of motion governing mobile robots are dependent on terrain properties such as the coefficient of friction, and contact model parameters. Estimating these properties is thus essential for robotic navigation. Ideally any map…
High-speed autonomous driving in off-road environments has immense potential for various applications, but it also presents challenges due to the complexity of vehicle-terrain interactions. In such environments, it is crucial for the…
Mobile robots, especially those driving outdoors and in unstructured terrain, sometimes suffer from failures and errors in locomotion, like unevenly pressurized or flat tires, loose axes or de-tracked tracks. Those are errors that go…
Robot navigation traditionally relies on building an explicit map that is used to plan collision-free trajectories to a desired target. In deformable, complex terrain, using geometric-based approaches can fail to find a path due to…
Legged robots must exhibit robust and agile locomotion across diverse, unstructured terrains, a challenge exacerbated under blind locomotion settings where terrain information is unavailable. This work introduces a hierarchical…
Robots are frequently tasked to gather relevant sensor data in unknown terrains. A key challenge for classical path planning algorithms used for autonomous information gathering is adaptively replanning paths online as the terrain is…
Autonomous off-road navigation requires robots to estimate terrain traversability from onboard sensors and plan motion accordingly. Conventional approaches typically rely on sampling-based planners such as MPPI to generate short-term…
Autonomous mobile robots need to perceive the environments with their onboard sensors (e.g., LiDARs and RGB cameras) and then make appropriate navigation decisions. In order to navigate human-inhabited public spaces, such a navigation task…
Autonomous terrain traversal of articulated tracked robots can reduce operator cognitive load to enhance task efficiency and facilitate extensive deployment. We present a novel hybrid trajectory optimization method aimed at generating…
The challenge of traversability estimation is a crucial aspect of autonomous navigation in unstructured outdoor environments such as forests. It involves determining whether certain areas are passable or risky for robots, taking into…
The safe deployment of autonomous vehicles relies on their ability to effectively react to environmental changes. This can require maneuvering on varying surfaces which is still a difficult problem, especially for slippery terrains. To…
This paper presents a data-driven decentralized trajectory optimization approach for multi-robot motion planning in dynamic environments. When navigating in a shared space, each robot needs accurate motion predictions of neighboring robots…
Moving in dynamic pedestrian environments is one of the important requirements for autonomous mobile robots. We present a model-based reinforcement learning approach for robots to navigate through crowded environments. The navigation policy…
Identifying the physical properties of the surrounding environment is essential for robotic locomotion and navigation to deal with non-geometric hazards, such as slippery and deformable terrains. It would be of great benefit for robots to…
Trajectory optimization with contact-rich behaviors has recently gained attention for generating diverse locomotion behaviors without pre-specified ground contact sequences. However, these approaches rely on precise models of robot dynamics…
Terrain awareness, i.e., the ability to identify and distinguish different types of terrain, is a critical ability that robots must have to succeed at autonomous off-road navigation. Current approaches that provide robots with this…
In this paper we tackle the problem of visually predicting surface friction for environments with diverse surfaces, and integrating this knowledge into biped robot locomotion planning. The problem is essential for autonomous robot…
Autonomous robots operating in complex, unstructured environments face significant challenges due to latent, unobserved factors that obscure their understanding of both their internal state and the external world. Addressing this challenge…
We present a self-supervised approach for learning to predict traversable paths for wheeled mobile robots that require good traction to navigate. Our algorithm, termed WayFAST (Waypoint Free Autonomous Systems for Traversability), uses RGB…
In this paper, we developed a new navigation system, which detects obstacles in a sliding window with an adaptive threshold clustering algorithm, classifies the detected obstacles with a decision tree, heuristically predicts potential…