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Learning has propelled the cutting edge of performance in robotic control to new heights, allowing robots to operate with high performance in conditions that were previously unimaginable. The majority of the work, however, assumes that the…
Research on coastal regions traditionally involves methods like manual sampling, monitoring buoys, and remote sensing, but these methods face challenges in spatially and temporally diverse regions of interest. Autonomous surface vehicles…
Legged robots are typically in rigid contact with the environment at multiple locations, which add a degree of complexity to their control. We present a method to control the motion and a subset of the contact forces of a floating-base…
Mobile robots should be capable of planning cost-efficient paths for autonomous navigation. Typically, the terrain and robot properties are subject to variations. For instance, properties of the terrain such as friction may vary across…
Combining multiple sensors enables a robot to maximize its perceptual awareness of environments and enhance its robustness to external disturbance, crucial to robotic navigation. This paper proposes the FusionPortable benchmark, a complete…
We describe a challenging robotics deployment in a complex ecosystem to monitor a rich plant community. The study site is dominated by dynamic grassland vegetation and is thus visually ambiguous and liable to drastic appearance change over…
We present a communication-free method for safe multi-robot coordination in complex environments such as forests with dense canopy cover, where GNSS is unavailable. Our approach relies on an onboard anisotropic 3D LiDAR sensor used for SLAM…
Quadrupedal robots resemble the physical ability of legged animals to walk through unstructured terrains. However, designing a controller for quadrupedal robots poses a significant challenge due to their functional complexity and requires…
Terrain awareness, i.e., the ability to identify and distinguish different types of terrain, is a critical ability that robots must have to succeed at autonomous off-road navigation. Current approaches that provide robots with this…
Attaining animal-like legged locomotion on rough outdoor terrain with sparse foothold affordances -a primary use-case for legs vs other forms of locomotion- is a largely open problem. New advancements in control and perception have enabled…
Stable and robust robotic grasping is essential for current and future robot applications. In recent works, the use of large datasets and supervised learning has enhanced speed and precision in antipodal grasping. However, these methods…
Humanoid robots are engineered to navigate terrains akin to those encountered by humans, which necessitates human-like locomotion and perceptual abilities. Currently, the most reliable controllers for humanoid motion rely exclusively on…
Over the past decades, improvements in data collection hardware coupled with novel artificial intelligence algorithms have made it possible for researchers to understand urban environments at an unprecedented scale. From local interactions…
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…
Unknown dynamic load carrying is one important practical application for quadruped robots. Such a problem is non-trivial, posing three major challenges in quadruped locomotion control. First, how to model or represent the dynamics of the…
Visual and scalar-field (e.g., chemical) sensing are two of the options robot teams can use to perceive their environments when performing tasks. We give the first comparison of the computational characteristic of visual and scalar-field…
Robotic pollination offers a promising alternative to manual labor and bumblebee-assisted methods in controlled agriculture, where wind-driven pollination is absent and regulatory restrictions limit the use of commercial pollinators. In…
Dynamic morphing wing flights present significant challenges in accurately estimating external forces due to complex interactions between aerodynamics, rapid wing movements, and external disturbances. Traditional force estimation methods…
Environmental monitoring is used to characterize the health and relationship between organisms and their environments. In forest ecosystems, robots can serve as platforms to acquire such data, even in hard-to-reach places where…
Large-scale environmental sensing with a finite number of mobile sensors is a challenging task that requires a lot of resources and time. This is especially true when features in the environment are spatiotemporally changing with unknown or…