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The goal of coordinated multi-robot exploration tasks is to employ a team of autonomous robots to explore an unknown environment as quickly as possible. Compared with human-designed methods, which began with heuristic and rule-based…
Cooperative mission planning for heterogeneous teams of mobile robots presents a unique set of challenges, particularly when operating under communication constraints and limited computational resources. To address these challenges, we…
Artificial intelligence has undergone immense growth and maturation in recent years, though autonomous systems have traditionally struggled when fielded in diverse and previously unknown environments. DARPA is seeking to change that with…
Robotic science missions in remote environments, such as deep ocean and outer space, can involve studying phenomena that cannot directly be observed using on-board sensors but must be deduced by combining measurements of correlated…
Autonomous exploration is a crucial aspect of robotics that has numerous applications. Most of the existing methods greedily choose goals that maximize immediate reward. This strategy is computationally efficient but insufficient for…
This paper presents a method for online trajectory planning in known environments. The proposed algorithm is a fusion of sampling-based techniques and model-based optimization via quadratic programming. The former is used to efficiently…
Volumetric maps are widely used in robotics due to their desirable properties in applications such as path planning, exploration, and manipulation. Constant advances in mapping technologies are needed to keep up with the improvements in…
This paper proposes a state-machine model for a multi-modal, multi-robot environmental sensing algorithm. This multi-modal algorithm integrates two different exploration algorithms: (1) coverage path planning using variable formations and…
In this paper, we present an approach for dynamic exploration and mapping of unknown environments using a swarm of biobotic sensing agents, with a stochastic natural motion model and a leading agent (e.g., an unmanned aerial vehicle). The…
Autonomous aerial robots are increasingly being deployed in real-world scenarios, where transparent glass obstacles present significant challenges to reliable navigation. Researchers have investigated the use of non-contact sensors and…
Path Planning and target searching in a three-dimensional environment is a challenging task in the field of robotics. It is an optimization problem as the path from source to destination has to be optimal. This paper aims to generate a…
A key requirement in robotics is the ability to simultaneously self-localize and map a previously unknown environment, relying primarily on onboard sensing and computation. Achieving fully onboard accurate simultaneous localization and…
We present a waypoint planning algorithm for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that is teamed with an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) for the task of search and rescue in a subterranean environment. The UAV and UGV are teamed such that the…
Multi-robot systems can greatly enhance efficiency through coordination and collaboration, yet in practice, full-time communication is rarely available and interactions are constrained to close-range exchanges. Existing methods either…
Conventional algorithms in autonomous exploration face challenges due to their inability to accurately and efficiently identify the spatial distribution of convex regions in the real-time map. These methods often prioritize navigation…
In this paper, we propose a method that, given a partial grid map of an indoor environment built by an autonomous mobile robot, estimates the amount of the explored area represented in the map, as well as whether the uncovered part is still…
Information gathering algorithms play a key role in unlocking the potential of robots for efficient data collection in a wide range of applications. However, most existing strategies neglect the fundamental problem of the robot pose…
We consider a problem called task ordering with path uncertainty (TOP-U) where multiple robots are provided with a set of task locations to visit in a bounded environment, but the length of the path between a pair of task locations is…
This paper presents a strategy to guide a mobile ground robot equipped with a camera or depth sensor, in order to autonomously map the visible part of a bounded three-dimensional structure. We describe motion planning algorithms that…
The area coverage problem is the task of efficiently servicing a given two-dimensional surface using sensors mounted on robots such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). We present a novel formulation for…