Related papers: PANav: Toward Privacy-Aware Robot Navigation via V…
Visual Semantic Navigation (VSN) is a fundamental problem in robotics, where an agent must navigate toward a target object in an unknown environment, mainly using visual information. Most state-of-the-art VSN models are trained in…
Recent advances in vision-language models have made zero-shot navigation feasible, enabling robots to follow natural language instructions without requiring labeling. However, existing methods that explicitly store language vectors in grid…
We study the problem of learning a navigation policy for a robot to actively search for an object of interest in an indoor environment solely from its visual inputs. While scene-driven visual navigation has been widely studied, prior…
Humans can robustly follow a visual trajectory defined by a sequence of images (i.e. a video) regardless of substantial changes in the environment or the presence of obstacles. We aim at endowing similar visual navigation capabilities to…
Learning effective visuomotor policies for robots purely from data is challenging, but also appealing since a learning-based system should not require manual tuning or calibration. In the case of a robot operating in a real environment the…
We present ConVOI, a novel method for autonomous robot navigation in real-world indoor and outdoor environments using Vision Language Models (VLMs). We employ VLMs in two ways: first, we leverage their zero-shot image classification…
In this paper, we present a planning framework that uses a combination of implicit (robot motion) and explicit (visual/audio/haptic feedback) communication during mobile robot navigation. First, we developed a model that approximates both…
Real-life robot navigation involves more than just reaching a destination; it requires optimizing movements while addressing scenario-specific goals. An intuitive way for humans to express these goals is through abstract cues like verbal…
Today, robotics is an auspicious and fast-growing branch of technology that involves the manufacturing, design, and maintenance of robot machines that can operate in an autonomous fashion and can be used in a wide variety of applications…
This paper reports on the development, execution, and open-sourcing of a new robotics course at MIT. The course is a modern take on "Visual Navigation for Autonomous Vehicles" (VNAV) and targets first-year graduate students and senior…
Humans can flexibly interpret and compose different goal specifications, such as language instructions, spatial coordinates, or visual references, when navigating to a destination. In contrast, most existing robotic navigation policies are…
This research aims at developing path and motion planning algorithms for a tethered Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to visually assist a teleoperated primary robot in unstructured or confined environments. The emerging state of the practice…
Visual navigation for robotics is inspired by the human ability to navigate environments using visual cues and memory, eliminating the need for detailed maps. In unseen, unmapped, or GPS-denied settings, traditional metric map-based methods…
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…
Recent advancements in Generative AI, particularly in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), offer new possibilities for integrating cognitive planning into robotic systems. In this work, we present a novel…
Autonomous aerial robots are increasingly being deployed in real-world scenarios, where transparent glass obstacles present significant challenges to reliable navigation. Researchers have investigated the use of non-contact sensors and…
Understanding and following natural language instructions while navigating through complex, real-world environments poses a significant challenge for general-purpose robots. These environments often include obstacles and pedestrians, making…
As more robots are being deployed into human environments, a human-aware navigation planner needs to handle multiple contexts that occur in indoor and outdoor environments. In this paper, we propose a tunable human-aware robot navigation…
Over the last years, social robots have been deployed in public environments making evident the need of human-aware navigation capabilities. In this regard, the robotics community have made efforts to include proxemics or social conventions…
Visually-guided underwater robots are deployed alongside human divers for cooperative exploration, inspection, and monitoring tasks in numerous shallow-water and coastal-water applications. The most essential capability of such companion…