Related papers: Mapping at First Sense: A Lightweight Neural Netwo…
The challenge of mapping indoor environments is addressed. Typical heuristic algorithms for solving the motion planning problem are frontier-based methods, that are especially effective when the environment is completely unknown. However,…
Exploration and collision-free navigation through an unknown environment is a fundamental task for autonomous robots. In this paper, a novel exploration strategy for Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) is presented. The goal of the exploration…
This paper details a system for fast visual exploration and search without prior map information. We leverage frontier based planning with both LiDAR and visual sensing and augment it with a perception module that contextually labels points…
Being able to explore unknown environments is a requirement for fully autonomous robots. Many learning-based methods have been proposed to learn an exploration strategy. In the frontier-based exploration, learning algorithms tend to learn…
Autonomous exploration is one of the important parts to achieve the fast autonomous mapping and target search. However, most of the existing methods are facing low-efficiency problems caused by low-quality trajectory or back-and-forth…
Most mobile robots for indoor use rely on 2D laser scanners for localization, mapping and navigation. These sensors, however, cannot detect transparent surfaces or measure the full occupancy of complex objects such as tables. Deep Neural…
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 paper proposes a reliable and robust planning solution to the long range robotic navigation problem in extremely cluttered environments. A two-layer planning architecture is proposed that leverages both the environment map and the…
Safe autonomous exploration of unknown environments is an essential skill for mobile robots to effectively and adaptively perform environmental mapping for diverse critical tasks. Due to its simplicity, most existing exploration methods…
We present a novel approach for enhancing robotic exploration by using generative occupancy mapping. We implement SceneSense, a diffusion model designed and trained for predicting 3D occupancy maps given partial observations. Our proposed…
Humans are expert explorers. Understanding the computational cognitive mechanisms that support this efficiency can advance the study of the human mind and enable more efficient exploration algorithms. We hypothesize that humans explore new…
In a typical path planning pipeline for a ground robot, we build a map (e.g., an occupancy grid) of the environment as the robot moves around. While navigating indoors, a ground robot's knowledge about the environment may be limited due to…
This paper investigates the automatic exploration problem under the unknown environment, which is the key point of applying the robotic system to some social tasks. The solution to this problem via stacking decision rules is impossible to…
In autonomous navigation of mobile robots, sensors suffer from massive occlusion in cluttered environments, leaving significant amount of space unknown during planning. In practice, treating the unknown space in optimistic or pessimistic…
We consider the problem of time-limited robotic exploration in previously unseen environments where exploration is limited by a predefined amount of time. We propose a novel exploration approach using learning-augmented model-based…
In indoor environments, multi-robot visual (RGB-D) mapping and exploration hold immense potential for application in domains such as domestic service and logistics, where deploying multiple robots in the same environment can significantly…
A hybrid map representation, which consists of a modified generalized Voronoi Diagram (GVD)-based topological map and a grid-based metric map, is proposed to facilitate a new frontier-driven exploration strategy. Exploration frontiers are…
Traditional simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) methods focus on improvement in the robot's localization under environment and sensor uncertainty. This paper, however, focuses on mitigating the need for exact localization of a…
In this paper, we address the problem of autonomous multi-robot mapping, exploration and navigation in unknown, GPS-denied indoor or urban environments using a swarm of robots equipped with directional sensors with limited sensing…
Autonomous robotic exploration of unknown and hazardous environments, a long-standing challenge, can be significantly improved by leveraging the advanced reasoning of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). We introduce a novel exploration pipeline…