Related papers: AnyTraverse: An off-road traversability framework …
Navigating robots safely and efficiently in crowded and complex environments remains a significant challenge. However, due to the dynamic and intricate nature of these settings, planning efficient and collision-free paths for robots to…
Autonomous explorative robots frequently encounter scenarios where multiple future trajectories can be pursued. Often these are cases with multiple paths around an obstacle or trajectory options towards various frontiers. Humans in such…
We consider how to directly extract a road map (also known as a topological representation) of an initially-unknown 2-dimensional environment via an online procedure that robustly computes a retraction of its boundaries. In this article, we…
Navigating robots discreetly in human work environments while considering the possible privacy implications of robotic tasks presents significant challenges. Such scenarios are increasingly common, for instance, when robots transport…
Autonomous systems are increasingly deployed in open and dynamic environments -- from city streets to aerial and indoor spaces -- where perception models must remain reliable under sensor noise, environmental variation, and platform shifts.…
As robotic navigation techniques in perception and planning advance, mobile robots increasingly venture into off-road environments involving complex traversability. However, selecting suitable planning methods remains a challenge due to…
Reactive collision avoidance is essential for agile robots navigating complex and dynamic environments, enabling real-time obstacle response. However, this task is inherently challenging because it requires a tight integration of…
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) tasks require an agent to follow textual instructions to navigate through 3D environments. Traditional approaches use supervised learning methods, relying heavily on domain-specific datasets to train VLN…
Autonomous exploration in unknown environments typically relies on onboard state estimation for localisation and mapping. Existing exploration methods primarily maximise coverage efficiency, but often overlook that visual-inertial odometry…
Efficient target localization and autonomous navigation in complex environments are fundamental to real-world embodied applications. While recent advances in multimodal foundation models have enabled zero-shot object goal navigation,…
Autonomous off-road navigation requires robots to estimate terrain traversability from onboard sensors and plan motion accordingly. Conventional approaches typically rely on sampling-based planners such as MPPI to generate short-term…
Social navigation in densely populated dynamic environments poses a significant challenge for autonomous mobile robots, requiring advanced strategies for safe interaction. Existing reinforcement learning (RL)-based methods require over…
Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) are highly adaptable to various downstream tasks through few-shot learning, making prompt-based anomaly detection a promising approach. Traditional methods depend on human-crafted prompts that…
Learning from demonstration is a powerful method for teaching robots new skills, and having more demonstration data often improves policy learning. However, the high cost of collecting demonstration data is a significant bottleneck. Videos,…
The popularity of mobile robots has been steadily growing, with these robots being increasingly utilized to execute tasks previously completed by human workers. For bipedal robots to see this same success, robust autonomous navigation…
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…
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…
Autonomous navigation in complex, unstructured outdoor environments requires robots to operate over long ranges without prior maps and limited depth sensing. In such settings, relying solely on geometric frontiers for exploration is often…
Algorithms for motion planning in unknown environments are generally limited in their ability to reason about the structure of the unobserved environment. As such, current methods generally navigate unknown environments by relying on…
Ground robots require the crucial capability of traversing unstructured and unprepared terrains and avoiding obstacles to complete tasks in real-world robotics applications such as disaster response. When a robot operates in off-road field…