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Motion planning for a multi-limbed climbing robot must consider the robot's posture, joint torques, and how it uses contact forces to interact with its environment. This paper focuses on motion planning for a robot that uses nontraditional…
Unstructured environments are difficult for autonomous driving. This is because various unknown obstacles are lied in drivable space without lanes, and its width and curvature change widely. In such complex environments, searching for a…
Autonomous locomotion for mobile ground robots in unstructured environments such as waypoint navigation or flipper control requires a sufficiently accurate prediction of the robot-terrain interaction. Heuristics like occupancy grids or…
In the realm of autonomous mobile robots, safe navigation through unpaved outdoor environments remains a challenging task. Due to the high-dimensional nature of sensor data, extracting relevant information becomes a complex problem, which…
Passive deformation due to compliance is a commonly used benefit of soft robots, providing opportunities to achieve robust actuation with few active degrees of freedom. Soft growing robots in particular have shown promise in navigation of…
Mountain slopes are perfect examples of harsh environments in which humans are required to perform difficult and dangerous operations such as removing unstable boulders, dangerous vegetation or deploying safety nets. A good replacement for…
This paper considers the problem of autonomous mobile robot navigation in unknown environments with moving obstacles. We propose a new method to achieve environment-aware safe tracking (EAST) of robot motion plans that integrates an…
Navigation inside luminal organs is an arduous task that requires non-intuitive coordination between the movement of the operator's hand and the information obtained from the endoscopic video. The development of tools to automate certain…
Manual pruning of radiata pine, a species of major economic importance to New Zealand forestry, is hazardous, labour-intensive, and increasingly constrained by workforce shortages. Existing autonomous pruning platforms typically rely on…
Although ground robotic autonomy has gained widespread usage in structured and controlled environments, autonomy in unknown and off-road terrain remains a difficult problem. Extreme, off-road, and unstructured environments such as…
Reticular structures form the backbone of major infrastructure like bridges, pylons, and airports, but their inspection and maintenance are costly and hazardous, often requiring human intervention. While prior research has focused on fault…
Neuroendovascular access often relies on passive microwires that are hand-shaped at the back table and then used to track a microcatheter to the target. Neuroendovascular surgeons determine the shape of the wire by examining the patient…
This paper presents a modular in-pipeline climbing robot with a novel compliant foldable OmniCrawler mechanism. The circular cross-section of the OmniCrawler module enables a holonomic motion to facilitate the alignment of the robot in the…
Fully autonomous mobile robots have a multitude of potential applications, but guaranteeing robust navigation performance remains an open research problem. For many tasks such as repeated infrastructure inspection, item delivery, or…
A robot guide dog has compelling advantages over animal guide dogs for its cost-effectiveness, potential for mass production, and low maintenance burden. However, despite the long history of guide dog robot research, previous studies were…
Reorienting objects by using supports is a practical yet challenging manipulation task. Owing to the intricate geometry of objects and the constrained feasible motions of the robot, multiple manipulation steps are required for object…
Natural environments such as forests and grasslands are challenging for robotic navigation because of the false perception of rigid obstacles from high grass, twigs, or bushes. In this work, we present Wild Visual Navigation (WVN), an…
A key challenge in fast ground robot navigation in 3D terrain is balancing robot speed and safety. Recent work has shown that 2.5D maps (2D representations with additional 3D information) are ideal for real-time safe and fast planning.…
Legged locomotion shows promise for running in complex, unstructured environments. Designing such legged robots requires considering heterogeneous, multi-domain constraints and variables, from mechanical hardware and geometry choices to…
Extrinsic manipulation, a technique that enables robots to leverage extrinsic resources for object manipulation, presents practical yet challenging scenarios. Particularly in the context of extrinsic manipulation on a supporting plane,…