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Environments with large terrain height variations present great challenges for legged robot locomotion. Drawing inspiration from fire ants' collective assembly behavior, we study strategies that can enable two ``connectable'' robots to…
This thesis presents a solution that enables aerial robots to reason about surrounding wind flow fields in real time using on board sensors and embedded flight hardware. The core novelty of this research is the fusion of range measurements…
The connectivity aspect of connected autonomous vehicles (CAV) is beneficial because it facilitates dissemination of traffic-related information to vehicles through Vehicle-to-External (V2X) communication. Onboard sensing equipment…
Visual navigation is essential for many applications in robotics, from manipulation, through mobile robotics to automated driving. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) provides an elegant map-free approach integrating image processing,…
Continuum robots, characterized by their high flexibility and infinite degrees of freedom (DoFs), have gained prominence in applications such as minimally invasive surgery and hazardous environment exploration. However, the intrinsic…
Autonomous navigation is a long-standing field of robotics research, which provides an essential capability for mobile robots to execute a series of tasks on the same environments performed by human everyday. In this chapter, we present a…
This work addresses the coordination problem of multiple robots with the goal of finding specific hazardous targets in an unknown area and dealing with them cooperatively. The desired behaviour for the robotic system entails multiple…
This paper introduces a novel and general method to address the problem of using a general-purpose robot manipulator with a parallel gripper to wrap a deformable linear object (DLO), called a rope, around a rigid object, called a rod,…
This paper proposes a novel data-driven control strategy for maintaining connectivity in networked multi-robot systems. Existing approaches often rely on a pre-determined communication model specifying whether pairwise robots can…
Robotic systems have become integral to smart environments, enabling applications ranging from urban surveillance and automated agriculture to industrial automation. However, their effective operation in dynamic settings - such as smart…
This paper underscores the importance of environmental monitoring, and specifically of freshwater ecosystems, which play a critical role in sustaining life and global economy. Despite their importance, insufficient data availability…
This paper presents a study on the development of an obstacle-avoidance navigation system for autonomous navigation in home environments. The system utilizes vision-based techniques and advanced path-planning algorithms to enable the robot…
Existing navigation policies for autonomous robots tend to focus on collision avoidance while ignoring human-robot interactions in social life. For instance, robots can pass along the corridor safer and easier if pedestrians notice them.…
We present controllers that enable mobile robots to persistently monitor or sweep a changing environment. The changing environment is modeled as a field which grows in locations that are not within range of a robot, and decreases in…
This paper presents a novel approach for aerial drone autonomous navigation along predetermined paths using only visual input form an onboard camera and without reliance on a Global Positioning System (GPS). It is based on using a deep…
Wheeled-legged robots, which have wheels at their feet and achieve high mobility by coordinating wheel drive and leg drive, have been developed. These robots have been developed purely as platforms specialized for locomotion. Therefore,…
Modern autonomous navigation systems predominantly rely on lidar and depth cameras. However, a fundamental question remains: Can flying robots navigate in clutter using solely monocular RGB images? Given the prohibitive costs of real-world…
The problem of multi-robot coverage control becomes significantly challenging when multiple robots leave the mission space simultaneously to charge their batteries, disrupting the underlying network topology for communication and sensing.…
This paper addresses the problem of mobile grasping in dynamic, unknown environments where a robot must operate under a limited field-of-view. The fundamental challenge is the inherent trade-off between ``seeing'' around to reduce…
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…