Related papers: Traverse the Non-Traversable: Estimating Traversab…
Traversability assessment of deformable terrain is vital for safe rover navigation on planetary surfaces. Machine learning (ML) is a powerful tool for traversability prediction but faces predictive uncertainty. This uncertainty leads to…
A major challenge with off-road autonomous navigation is the lack of maps or road markings that can be used to plan a path for autonomous robots. Classical path planning methods mostly assume a perfectly known environment without accounting…
Unknown dynamic load carrying is one important practical application for quadruped robots. Such a problem is non-trivial, posing three major challenges in quadruped locomotion control. First, how to model or represent the dynamics of the…
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 use of visual information for the navigation of unmanned ground vehicles in a cross-country environment recently received great attention. However, until now, the use of textural information has been somewhat less effective than color…
This paper introduces a new technique for learning probabilistic models of mass and friction distributions of unknown objects, and performing robust sliding actions by using the learned models. The proposed method is executed in two…
To operate with limited sensor horizons in unpredictable environments, autonomous robots use a receding-horizon strategy to plan trajectories, wherein they execute a short plan while creating the next plan. However, creating safe,…
As autonomous robots increasingly become part of daily life, they will often encounter dynamic environments while only having limited information about their surroundings. Unfortunately, due to the possible presence of malicious dynamic…
We propose a novel method, ProNav, which uses proprioceptive signals for traversability estimation in challenging outdoor terrains for autonomous legged robot navigation. Our approach uses sensor data from a legged robot's joint encoders,…
We study the problem of bipedal robot navigation in complex environments with uncertain and rough terrain. In particular, we consider a scenario in which the robot is expected to reach a desired goal location by traversing an environment…
Non-prehensile object transportation offers a way to enhance robotic performance in object manipulation tasks, especially with unstable objects. Effective trajectory planning requires simultaneous consideration of robot motion constraints…
We address the challenge of enabling bipedal robots to traverse rough terrain by developing probabilistically safe planning and control strategies that ensure dynamic feasibility and centroidal robustness under terrain uncertainty.…
Mobile robots rely on maps to navigate through an environment. In the absence of any map, the robots must build the map online from partial observations as they move in the environment. Traditional methods build a map using only direct…
The ability to plan informative paths online is essential to robot autonomy. In particular, sampling-based approaches are often used as they are capable of using arbitrary information gain formulations. However, they are prone to local…
To safely traverse non-flat terrain, robots must account for the influence of terrain shape in their planned motions. Terrain-aware motion planners use an estimate of the vehicle roll and pitch as a function of pose, vehicle suspension, and…
Quadrotors can provide services such as infrastructure inspection and search-and-rescue, which require operating autonomously in cluttered environments. Autonomy is typically achieved with receding-horizon planning, where a short plan is…
Terramechanics plays a critical role in the areas of ground vehicles and ground mobile robots since understanding and estimating the variables influencing the vehicle-terrain interaction may mean the success or the failure of an entire…
Safe autonomous navigation in unknown environments remains a critical challenge for robots with limited sensing capabilities. While safety-critical control techniques, such as Control Barrier Functions (CBFs), have been proposed to ensure…
Autonomous robot navigation in off-road environments requires a comprehensive understanding of the terrain geometry and traversability. The degraded perceptual conditions and sparse geometric information at longer ranges make the problem…
Dynamic quadrupedal locomotion over rough terrains reveals remarkable progress over the last few decades. Small-scale quadruped robots are adequately flexible and adaptable to traverse uneven terrains along sagittal direction, such as…