Related papers: Underground Multi-robot Systems at Work: a revolut…
We present a novel mission-planning strategy for heterogeneous multi-robot teams, taking into account the specific constraints and capabilities of each robot. Our approach employs hierarchical trees to systematically break down complex…
Mobile manipulators are envisioned to serve more complex roles in people's everyday lives. With recent breakthroughs in large language models, task planners have become better at translating human verbal instructions into a sequence of…
In this paper we present a reformulation--framed as a constrained optimization problem--of multi-robot tasks which are encoded through a cost function that is to be minimized. The advantages of this approach are multiple. The…
In this report, we try to improve the performance of existing approaches for search operations in multi-robot context. We propose three novel algorithms that are using a triangular grid pattern, i.e., robots certainly go through the…
Long-term Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) is crucial for enabling flexible manufacturing systems and integrating companion robots into daily human environments over extended periods. This paper identifies several key challenges for such…
Studies of human-robot interaction in dynamic and unstructured environments show that as more advanced robotic capabilities are deployed, the need for cooperative competencies to support collaboration with human problem-holders increases.…
In disaster-stricken environments, it's vital to assess the damage quickly, analyse the stability of the environment, and allocate resources to the most vulnerable areas where victims might be present. These missions are difficult and…
Multiple levels of safety measures are required by multiple interaction modes which collaborative robots need to perform industrial tasks with human co-workers. We develop three independent modules to account for safety in different types…
The autonomous exploration of environments by multi-robot systems is a critical task with broad applications in rescue missions, exploration endeavors, and beyond. Current approaches often rely on either greedy frontier selection or…
Autonomous robots operating in open environments need the ability to continuously handle tasks that are not covered by predefined local methods. However, existing approaches often rely on repeated large-language-model (LLM) interaction for…
We consider a team of heterogeneous robots which are deployed within a common workspace to gather different types of data. The robots have different roles due to different capabilities: some gather data from the workspace (source robots)…
In post-disaster scenarios, efficient search and rescue operations involve collaborative efforts between robots and humans. Existing planning approaches focus on specific aspects but overlook crucial elements like information gathering,…
Field robot systems have recently been applied to a wide range of research fields. Making such systems more automated, advanced, and activated requires cooperation among heterogeneous robots. Classic control theory is inefficient in…
Mapping is a time-consuming process for deploying robotic systems to new environments. The handling of maps is also risk-adverse when not managed effectively. We propose here, a standardised approach to handling such maps in a manner which…
Robot autonomy in unknown, GPS-denied, and complex underground environments requires real-time, robust, and accurate onboard pose estimation and mapping for reliable operations. This becomes particularly challenging in perception-degraded…
Multi-robot flocking possesses extraordinary advantages over a single-robot system in diverse domains, but it is challenging to ensure safe and optimal performance in congested environments. Hence, this paper is focused on the investigation…
In this paper we propose FlexHRC+, a hierarchical human-robot cooperation architecture designed to provide collaborative robots with an extended degree of autonomy when supporting human operators in high-variability shop-floor tasks. The…
Many industrial tasks-such as sanding, installing fasteners, and wire harnessing-are difficult to automate due to task complexity and variability. We instead investigate deploying robots in an assistive role for these tasks, where the robot…
Humanoid robots are drawing significant attention as versatile platforms for complex motor control, human-robot interaction, and general-purpose physical intelligence. However, achieving efficient whole-body control (WBC) in humanoids…
Multi-robot motion planning (MRMP) is the problem of finding collision-free paths for a set of robots in a continuous state space. The difficulty of MRMP increases with the number of robots and is exacerbated in environments with narrow…