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Grounding open-ended semantic instructions into physically executable local goals is a fundamental challenge in human-robot interaction. While existing navigation frameworks often regress deterministic waypoints, this rigid formulation…
The ability to autonomously navigate in unknown environments is important for mobile robots. The map is the core component to achieve this. Most map representations rely on drift-free state estimation and provide a global metric map to…
Traditional approaches for active mapping focus on building geometric maps. For most real-world applications, however, actionable information is related to semantically meaningful objects in the environment. We propose an approach to the…
Accurate and robust state estimation is critical for autonomous navigation of robot teams. This task is especially challenging for large groups of size, weight, and power (SWAP) constrained aerial robots operating in perceptually-degraded…
Understanding object affordances is essential for enabling robots to perform purposeful and fine-grained interactions in diverse and unstructured environments. However, existing approaches either rely on retrieval, which is fragile due to…
Achieving generalizable and precise robotic manipulation across diverse environments remains a critical challenge, largely due to limitations in spatial perception. While prior imitation-learning approaches have made progress, their…
Visual robot navigation within large-scale, semi-structured environments deals with various challenges such as computation intensive path planning algorithms or insufficient knowledge about traversable spaces. Moreover, many…
Spatial understanding is a crucial capability that enables robots to perceive their surroundings, reason about their environment, and interact with it meaningfully. In modern robotics, these capabilities are increasingly provided by…
While humans can successfully navigate using abstractions, ignoring details that are irrelevant to the task at hand, most existing robotic applications require the maintenance of a detailed environment representation which consumes a…
Accurate perception of objects in the environment is important for improving the scene understanding capability of SLAM systems. In robotic and augmented reality applications, object maps with semantic and metric information show attractive…
Mapping and navigation have gone hand-in-hand since long before robots existed. Maps are a key form of communication, allowing someone who has never been somewhere to nonetheless navigate that area successfully. In the context of…
Current robotic planning methods often rely on predicting multi-frame images with full pixel details. While this fine-grained approach can serve as a generic world model, it introduces two significant challenges for downstream policy…
Recent advances in data-driven models for grounded language understanding have enabled robots to interpret increasingly complex instructions. Two fundamental limitations of these methods are that most require a full model of the environment…
Mapping is crucial for spatial reasoning, planning and robot navigation. Existing approaches range from metric, which require precise geometry-based optimization, to purely topological, where image-as-node based graphs lack explicit…
Accurate and robust global localization is essential to robotics applications. We propose a novel global localization method that employs the map traversability as a hidden observation. The resulting map-corrected odometry localization is…
While interacting in the world is a multi-sensory experience, many robots continue to predominantly rely on visual perception to map and navigate in their environments. In this work, we propose Audio-Visual-Language Maps (AVLMaps), a…
Current robots are capable of computing plans to accomplish complex tasks. However, real-world environments are inherently open and dynamic, and unforeseen situations frequently arise during plan execution, such as jamming doors and fallen…
Mapping and localization are two essential tasks for mobile robots in real-world applications. However, largescale and dynamic scenes challenge the accuracy and robustness of most current mature solutions. This situation becomes even worse…
Climate change is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century, and many in the robotics community are looking for ways to contribute. This paper presents a roadmap for climate-relevant robotics research, identifying high-impact…
Autonomous robots can benefit greatly from human-provided semantic characterizations of uncertain task environments and states. However, the development of integrated strategies which let robots model, communicate, and act on such 'soft…