Related papers: MapEx: Indoor Structure Exploration with Probabili…
This article presents a novel and flexible multitask multilayer Bayesian mapping framework with readily extendable attribute layers. The proposed framework goes beyond modern metric-semantic maps to provide even richer environmental…
Exploring and traversing extreme terrain with surface robots is difficult, but highly desirable for many applications, including exploration of planetary surfaces, search and rescue, among others. For these applications, to ensure the robot…
Model-based reinforcement learning is a powerful tool, but collecting data to fit an accurate model of the system can be costly. Exploring an unknown environment in a sample-efficient manner is hence of great importance. However, the…
Many robotic tasks in real-world environments require physical interactions with an object such as pick up or push. For successful interactions, the robot needs to know the object's affordances, which are defined as the potential actions…
Mobile robotic gas distribution mapping (GDM) provides critical situational awareness during emergency responses to hazardous gas releases. However, most systems still rely on teleoperation, limiting scalability and response speed.…
For tasks conducted in unknown environments with efficiency requirements, real-time navigation of multi-robot systems remains challenging due to unfamiliarity with surroundings.In this paper, we propose a novel multi-robot collaborative…
This paper focuses on online occupancy mapping and real-time collision checking onboard an autonomous robot navigating in a large unknown environment. Commonly used voxel and octree map representations can be easily maintained in a small…
In this paper, we propose an autonomous exploration and a tapping mechanism-based material mapping system for a mobile robot in unknown environments. The goal of the proposed system is to integrate simultaneous localization and mapping…
Robots operating alongside humans often encounter unfamiliar environments that make autonomous task completion challenging. Though improving models and increasing dataset size can enhance a robot's performance in unseen environments, data…
The budgeted information gathering problem - where a robot with a fixed fuel budget is required to maximize the amount of information gathered from the world - appears in practice across a wide range of applications in autonomous…
Path planning in unknown environments is a crucial yet inherently challenging capability for mobile robots, which primarily encompasses two coupled tasks: autonomous exploration and point-goal navigation. In both cases, the robot must…
The hunter and gatherer approach copes with the problem of dynamic multi-robot task allocation, where tasks are unknowingly distributed over an environment. This approach employs two complementary teams of agents: one agile in exploring…
This paper investigates exploration strategies of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods to learn navigation policies for mobile robots. In particular, we augment the normal external reward for training DRL algorithms with intrinsic…
Mobile robots in unknown cluttered environments with irregularly shaped obstacles often face energy and communication challenges which directly affect their ability to explore these environments. In this paper, we introduce a novel deep…
The problem of planning sensing trajectories for a mobile robot to collect observations of a target and predict its future trajectory is known as active target tracking. Enabled by probabilistic motion models, one may solve this problem by…
In this work, we present a novel distributed method for constructing an occupancy grid map of an unknown environment using a swarm of robots with global localization capabilities and limited inter-robot communication. The robots explore the…
Autonomous robot person-following (RPF) systems are crucial for personal assistance and security but suffer from target loss due to occlusions in dynamic, unknown environments. Current methods rely on pre-built maps and assume static…
We propose an approach to learning agents for active robotic mapping, where the goal is to map the environment as quickly as possible. The agent learns to map efficiently in simulated environments by receiving rewards corresponding to how…
In this paper, we exploit minimal sensing information gathered from biologically inspired sensor networks to perform exploration and mapping in an unknown environment. A probabilistic motion model of mobile sensing nodes, inspired by motion…
Exploration is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Many of the current exploration methods for deep RL use task-agnostic objectives, such as information gain or bonuses based on state visitation. However, many practical…