Related papers: Feeling the Force: A Nuanced Physics-based Travers…
In the context of mobile navigation in unstructured environments, the predominant approach entails the avoidance of obstacles. The prevailing path planning algorithms are contingent upon deviating from the intended path for an indefinite…
Tactile perception is an essential ability of intelligent robots in interaction with their surrounding environments. This perception as an intermediate level acts between sensation and action and has to be defined properly to generate…
Soft growing robots, are a type of robots that are designed to move and adapt to their environment in a similar way to how plants grow and move with potential applications where they could be used to navigate through tight spaces, dangerous…
This paper presents a novel six-axis force/torque (F/T) sensor based on inductive sensing technology. Unlike conventional strain gauge-based sensors that require direct contact and external amplification, the proposed sensor utilizes…
The recent development of novel aerial vehicles capable of physically interacting with the environment leads to new applications such as contact-based inspection. These tasks require the robotic system to exchange forces with…
Despite advances in a diversity of environments, snake robots are still far behind snakes in traversing complex 3-D terrain with large obstacles. This is due to a lack of understanding of how to control 3-D body bending to push against…
The ability to efficiently and effectively explore planetary surfaces is currently limited by the capability of wheeled rovers to traverse challenging terrains, and by pre-programmed data acquisition plans with limited in-situ flexibility.…
Traversability estimation in rugged, unstructured environments remains a challenging problem in field robotics. Often, the need for precise, accurate traversability estimation is in direct opposition to the limited sensing and compute…
Objects moving in fluids experience patterns of stress on their surfaces determined by their motion and the geometry of nearby boundaries. Fish and underwater robots can use these patterns for navigation. This paper extends this…
Recently, the navigation of mobile robots in unknown environments has become a particularly significant research topic. Previous studies have primarily employed real-time environmental mapping using cameras and LiDAR, along with…
We present a self-supervised approach for learning to predict traversable paths for wheeled mobile robots that require good traction to navigate. Our algorithm, termed WayFAST (Waypoint Free Autonomous Systems for Traversability), uses RGB…
Soft robots are intrinsically capable of adapting to different environments by changing their shape in response to interaction forces with the environment. However, sensing and feedback are still required for higher level decisions and…
This paper addresses the challenge of active perception within autonomous navigation in complex, unknown environments. Revisiting the foundational principles of active perception, we introduce an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework…
Deep reinforcement learning has great potential to acquire complex, adaptive behaviors for autonomous agents automatically. However, the underlying neural network polices have not been widely deployed in real-world applications, especially…
Robots that physically interact with their surroundings, in order to accomplish some tasks or assist humans in their activities, require to exploit contact forces in a safe and proficient manner. Impedance control is considered as a…
We investigate the scenario that a robot needs to reach a designated goal after taking a sequence of appropriate actions in a non-static environment that is partially structured. One application example is to control a marine vehicle to…
Reliable estimation of terrain traversability is critical for the successful deployment of autonomous systems in wild, outdoor environments. Given the lack of large-scale annotated datasets for off-road navigation, strictly-supervised…
Estimating the impact intensity is one of the significant tasks of the legged robot. Accurate feedback of the impact may support the robot to plan a suitable and efficient trajectory to adapt to unknown complex terrains. Ordinarily, this…
Human navigation in built environments depends on symbolic spatial information which has unrealised potential to enhance robot navigation capabilities. Information sources such as labels, signs, maps, planners, spoken directions, and…
Aerial manipulation requires force-aware capabilities to enable safe and effective grasping and physical interaction. Previous works often rely on heavy, expensive force sensors unsuitable for typical quadrotor platforms, or perform…