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Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) have become the de facto vehicle for remote operations involving oceanography, inspection, and monitoring tasks. These vehicles operate in different and often challenging environments; hence, the design…
The rise of deep learning has caused a paradigm shift in robotics research, favoring methods that require large amounts of data. Unfortunately, it is prohibitively expensive to generate such data sets on a physical platform. Therefore,…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has gained traction for its success in solving complex tasks for robotic applications. However, its deployment on physical robots remains challenging due to safety risks and the comparatively high costs of…
Sim-to-real transfer is a fundamental challenge in robot reinforcement learning. Discrepancies between simulation and reality can significantly impair policy performance, especially if it receives high-dimensional inputs such as dense depth…
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for autonomously acquiring complex behaviors from low level sensor observations. Although a large portion of deep RL research has focused on applications in video games…
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to a variety of game-like environments. However, the application of deep RL to visual navigation with realistic environments is a challenging task. We propose a novel learning…
An exciting and promising frontier for Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is its application to real-world robotic systems. While modern DRL approaches achieved remarkable successes in many robotic scenarios (including mobile robotics,…
Autonomous navigation in underwater environments remains a major challenge due to the absence of GPS, degraded visibility, and the presence of submerged obstacles. This article investigates these issues through the case of the BlueROV2, an…
Compliance with maritime traffic rules is essential for the safe operation of autonomous vessels, yet training reinforcement learning (RL) agents to adhere to them is challenging. The behavior of RL agents is shaped by the training…
In this paper, a real-time quasi-optimal trajectory planning scheme is employed to guide an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) safely into a funnel-shape stationary docking station. By taking advantage of the direct method of calculus of…
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Subterranean Challenge requires teams of robots to traverse difficult and diverse underground environments. Traversing small gaps is one of the challenging scenarios that robots…
Autonomous navigation in dynamic environments is a complex but essential task for autonomous robots. Recent deep reinforcement learning approaches show promising results to solve the problem, but it is not solved yet, as they typically…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used in automated inspection, delivery, and navigation tasks that require reliable autonomy. This project develops a reinforcement learning (RL) approach to enable a single UAV to…
Autonomous driving is complex, requiring sophisticated 3D scene understanding, localization, mapping, and control. Rather than explicitly modelling and fusing each of these components, we instead consider an end-to-end approach via…
Control theory provides engineers with a multitude of tools to design controllers that manipulate the closed-loop behavior and stability of dynamical systems. These methods rely heavily on insights about the mathematical model governing the…
Recent years have witnessed significant progress in autonomous navigation using reinforcement learning. However, existing approaches largely emphasize reinforcement learning framework design, such as input representations, action spaces,…
Creating safe paths in unknown and uncertain environments is a challenging aspect of leader-follower formation control. In this architecture, the leader moves toward the target by taking optimal actions, and followers should also avoid…
This paper investigates how the performance of visual navigation policies trained in simulation compares to policies trained with real-world data. Performance degradation of simulator-trained policies is often significant when they are…
Sim-to real gap in Reinforcement Learning is when a model trained in a simulator does not translate to the real world. This is a problem for Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) as vehicle dynamics can vary from simulation to reality, and also from…
Recently, deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown some impressive successes in robotic manipulation applications. However, training robots in the real world is nontrivial owing to sample efficiency and safety concerns. Sim-to-real…