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Monitoring and controlling invasive tree species across large forests, parks, and trail networks is challenging due to limited accessibility, reliance on manual scouting, and degraded under-canopy GNSS. We present MapForest, a modular field…
Perceiving the surrounding environment is crucial for autonomous mobile robots. An elevation map provides a memory-efficient and simple yet powerful geometric representation for ground robots. The robots can use this information for…
The safe deployment of autonomous vehicles relies on their ability to effectively react to environmental changes. This can require maneuvering on varying surfaces which is still a difficult problem, especially for slippery terrains. To…
We study the problem of bipedal robot navigation in complex environments with uncertain and rough terrain. In particular, we consider a scenario in which the robot is expected to reach a desired goal location by traversing an environment…
For decades, solutions to regional scale landslide prediction have mostly relied on data-driven models, by definition, disconnected from the physics of the failure mechanism. The success and spread of such tools came from the ability to…
The identification of material parameters occurring in constitutive models has a wide range of applications in practice. One of these applications is the monitoring and assessment of the actual condition of infrastructure buildings, as the…
Earthmoving operations with wheel loaders require substantial power and incur high operational costs. This work presents an efficient automation framework based on the Fundamental Earthmoving Equation (FEE) for soil-tool interaction…
Effective use of camera-based vision systems is essential for robust performance in autonomous off-road driving, particularly in the high-speed regime. Despite success in structured, on-road settings, current end-to-end approaches for scene…
A multiscale model for real-time simulation of terrain dynamics is explored. To represent the dynamics on different scales the model combines the description of soil as a continuous solid, as distinct particles and as rigid multibodies. The…
Traditional soil sampling and analysis methods are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and limited in spatial resolution, making them unsuitable for large-scale precision agriculture. To address these limitations, we present a robotic solution…
Direct observations of earthquake nucleation and propagation are few and yet the next decade will likely see an unprecedented increase in indirect, surface observations that must be integrated into modeling efforts. Machine learning (ML)…
Efficient navigation through uneven terrain remains a challenging endeavor for autonomous robots. We propose a new geometric-based uneven terrain mapless navigation framework combining a Sparse Gaussian Process (SGP) local map with a…
Accurate traversability estimation using an online dense terrain map is crucial for safe navigation in challenging environments like construction and disaster areas. However, traversability estimation for legged robots on rough terrains…
Terrain awareness is an essential milestone to enable truly autonomous off-road navigation. Accurately predicting terrain characteristics allows optimizing a vehicle's path against potential hazards. Recent methods use deep neural networks…
Autonomous ground vehicles operating off-road must plan curvature-feasible paths while accounting for spatially varying soil strength and slope hazards in real time. We present a continuous state--cost metric that combines a Bekker…
A new 3D localization and mapping techinque with terrain inclination assistance is proposed in this paper to allow a robot to identify its location and build a global map in an outdoor environment. The Iterative Closest Points (ICP)…
Occupancy mapping has been a key enabler of mobile robotics. Originally based on a discrete grid representation, occupancy mapping has evolved towards continuous representations that can predict the occupancy status at any location and…
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…
Robotic mapping is attractive in many scientific applications that involve environmental surveys. This paper presents a system for localization and mapping of sparsely distributed surface features such as precariously balanced rocks (PBRs),…
Understanding the traversability of terrain is essential for autonomous robot navigation, particularly in unstructured environments such as natural landscapes. Although traditional methods, such as occupancy mapping, provide a basic…