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Recent advances in metric, semantic, and topological mapping have equipped autonomous robots with semantic concept grounding capabilities to interpret natural language tasks. This work aims to leverage these new capabilities with an…
While 2D occupancy maps commonly used in mobile robotics enable safe navigation in indoor environments, in order for robots to understand and interact with their environment and its inhabitants representing 3D geometry and semantic…
While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are set to transform robotic navigation, existing methods often underutilize their reasoning capabilities. To unlock the full potential of VLMs in robotics, we shift their role from passive observers to…
While Visual Large Language Models (VLLMs) show great promise as embodied agents, they continue to face substantial challenges in spatial reasoning. Existing embodied benchmarks largely focus on passive, static household environments and…
Autonomous navigation in unfamiliar environments requires robots to simultaneously explore, localise, and plan under uncertainty, without relying on predefined maps or extensive training. We present Active Inference MAPping and Planning…
Visual target navigation is a critical capability for autonomous robots operating in unknown environments, particularly in human-robot interaction scenarios. While classical and learning-based methods have shown promise, most existing…
This paper contributes a novel strategy for semantics-aware autonomous exploration and inspection path planning. Attuned to the fact that environments that need to be explored often involve a sparse set of semantic entities of particular…
This work studies the problem of object goal navigation which involves navigating to an instance of the given object category in unseen environments. End-to-end learning-based navigation methods struggle at this task as they are ineffective…
Navigating towards fully open language goals and exploring open scenes in an intelligent way have always raised significant challenges. Recently, Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities to reason with both…
As real-time analysis of the new data become increasingly compelling, more organizations deploy Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) systems to support real-time queries on data recently generated by online transaction…
Organic reaction mechanisms are the stepwise elementary reactions by which reactants form intermediates and products, and are fundamental to understanding chemical reactivity and designing new molecules and reactions. Although large…
Moving objects to find a fully-occluded target object, known as mechanical search, is a challenging problem in robotics. As objects are often organized semantically, we conjecture that semantic information about object relationships can…
This paper presents a study on the development of an obstacle-avoidance navigation system for autonomous navigation in home environments. The system utilizes vision-based techniques and advanced path-planning algorithms to enable the robot…
The global rise in the number of people with physical disabilities, in part due to improvements in post-trauma survivorship and longevity, has amplified the demand for advanced assistive technologies to improve mobility and independence.…
Motion planning in off-road environments requires reasoning about both the geometry and semantics of the scene (e.g., a robot may be able to drive through soft bushes but not a fallen log). In many recent works, the world is classified into…
Semantic mapping methods are increasingly used as intermediate scene representations for downstream robotic reasoning and manipulation, yet their evaluation is still largely tied to fixed benchmark datasets with limited coverage of…
LLMs and MLLMs have become indispensable tools across a wide range of applications. E-commerce, however, poses distinctive challenges -- including intricate domain knowledge, long-tail product evidence, heterogeneous visual data, and the…
Visual place recognition and simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) have recently begun to be used in real-world autonomous navigation tasks like food delivery. Existing datasets for SLAM research are often not representative of in…
Navigational signs enable humans to navigate unfamiliar environments without maps. This work studies how robots can similarly exploit signs for mapless navigation in the open world. A central challenge lies in interpreting signs: real-world…
Open-Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation (OVMM) is a crucial capability for autonomous robots, especially when faced with the challenges posed by unknown and dynamic environments. This task requires robots to explore and build a semantic…