Related papers: Shrinking POMCP: A Framework for Real-Time UAV Sea…
Mapping is essential in robotics and autonomous systems because it provides the spatial foundation for path planning. Efficient mapping enables planning algorithms to generate reliable paths while ensuring safety and adapting in real time…
Safe navigation of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) requires not only obstacle-free flight paths according to a static environment map, but also the perception of and reaction to previously unknown and dynamic objects. This implies that the…
This paper explores minimum sensing navigation of robots in environments cluttered with obstacles. The general objective is to find a path plan to a goal region that requires minimal sensing effort. In [1], the information-geometric RRT*…
Motivated by agility, 3D mobility, and low-risk operation compared to human-operated management systems of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), this work studies UAV-based active wildfire monitoring where a UAV detects fire incidents…
This paper addresses the problem of optimal control of robotic sensing systems aimed at autonomous information gathering in scenarios such as environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and surveillance and reconnaissance. The information…
In many engineering systems, proper predictive maintenance and operational control are essential to increase efficiency and reliability while reducing maintenance costs. However, one of the major challenges is that many sensors are used for…
We present an efficient path planning algorithm for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle surveying a cluttered urban landscape. A special emphasis is on maximizing area surveyed while adhering to constraints of the UAV and partially known and…
Partially-Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are typically solved by finding an approximate global solution to a corresponding belief-MDP. In this paper, we offer a new planning algorithm for POMDPs with continuous state, action…
Utilizing autonomous drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has shown great advantages over preceding methods in support of urgent scenarios such as search and rescue (SAR) and wildfire detection. In these operations, search efficiency…
Robots often localize to lower navigational errors and facilitate downstream, high-level tasks. However, a robot may want to selectively localize when localization is costly (such as with resource-constrained robots) or inefficient (for…
Path planning is a crucial algorithmic approach for designing robot behaviors. Sampling-based approaches, like rapidly exploring random trees (RRTs) or probabilistic roadmaps, are prominent algorithmic solutions for path planning problems.…
The increasing use of autonomous robot systems in hazardous environments underscores the need for efficient search and rescue operations. Despite significant advancements, existing literature on object search often falls short in overcoming…
A crucial challenge to efficient and robust motion planning for autonomous vehicles is understanding the intentions of the surrounding agents. Ignoring the intentions of the other agents in dynamic environments can lead to risky or…
Standard value function approaches to finding policies for Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are generally considered to be intractable for large models. The intractability of these algorithms is to a large extent a…
Robotic systems must be able to quickly and robustly make decisions when operating in uncertain and dynamic environments. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) can be used to compute optimal policies with little prior knowledge about the…
Target search with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is relevant problem to many scenarios, e.g., search and rescue (SaR). However, a key challenge is planning paths for maximal search efficiency given flight time constraints. To address…
Autonomous agents face the challenge of coordinating multiple tasks (perception, motion planning, controller) which are computationally expensive on a single onboard computer. To utilize the onboard processing capacity optimally, it is…
We propose a solution for Active Visual Search of objects in an environment, whose 2D floor map is the only known information. Our solution has three key features that make it more plausible and robust to detector failures compared to…
For accomplishing a variety of missions in challenging environments, the capability of navigating with full autonomy while avoiding unexpected obstacles is the most crucial requirement for UAVs in real applications. In this paper, we…
Planning under partial obervability is essential for autonomous robots. A principled way to address such planning problems is the Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). Although solving POMDPs is computationally intractable,…