Related papers: Safe Active Navigation and Exploration for Planeta…
Tensegrity robots, composed of rigid struts and elastic tendons, provide impact resistance, low mass, and adaptability to unstructured terrain. Their compliance and complex, coupled dynamics, however, present modeling and control…
Deep neural networks trained on demonstrations of human actions give robot the ability to perform self-driving on the road. However, navigation in a pedestrian-rich environment, such as a campus setup, is still challenging---one needs to…
This paper describes a method of estimating the traversability of plant parts covering a path and navigating through them for mobile robots operating in plant-rich environments. Conventional mobile robots rely on scene recognition methods…
This paper presents a novel approach to modeling curiosity in a mobile robot, which is useful for monitoring and adaptive data collection tasks, especially in the context of long term autonomous missions where pre-programmed missions are…
Unstructured environments such as mountains, caves, construction sites, or disaster areas are challenging for autonomous navigation because of terrain irregularities. In particular, it is crucial to plan a path to avoid risky terrain and…
We present ProxEmo, a novel end-to-end emotion prediction algorithm for socially aware robot navigation among pedestrians. Our approach predicts the perceived emotions of a pedestrian from walking gaits, which is then used for…
In recent years, the numbers of life-size humanoids as well as their mobile capabilities have steadily grown. Stable walking motion and control for humanoid robots are active fields of research. In this scenario an open question is how to…
Autonomous navigation in extreme mountainous terrains poses challenges due to the presence of mobility-stressing elements and undulating surfaces, making it particularly difficult compared to conventional off-road driving scenarios. In such…
It is a challenging task for ground robots to autonomously navigate in harsh environments due to the presence of non-trivial obstacles and uneven terrain. This requires trajectory planning that balances safety and efficiency. The primary…
Legged robots navigating cluttered environments must be jointly agile for efficient task execution and safe to avoid collisions with obstacles or humans. Existing studies either develop conservative controllers (< 1.0 m/s) to ensure safety,…
Exploring and traversing extreme terrain with surface robots is difficult, but highly desirable for many applications, including exploration of planetary surfaces, search and rescue, among others. For these applications, to ensure the robot…
Soft, growing vine robots are well-suited for exploring cluttered, unknown environments, and are theorized to be performant during structural collapse incidents caused by earthquakes, fires, explosions, and material flaws. These vine robots…
Robot navigation traditionally relies on building an explicit map that is used to plan collision-free trajectories to a desired target. In deformable, complex terrain, using geometric-based approaches can fail to find a path due to…
This study proposes a hierarchically integrated framework for safe task and motion planning (TAMP) of bipedal locomotion in a partially observable environment with dynamic obstacles and uneven terrain. The high-level task planner employs…
Mobile robots rely on maps to navigate through an environment. In the absence of any map, the robots must build the map online from partial observations as they move in the environment. Traditional methods build a map using only direct…
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) techniques play a key role towards long-term autonomy of mobile robots due to the ability to correct localization errors and produce consistent maps of an environment over time. Contrarily to…
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…
Ground robot navigation in complex 3D environments is often hindered by geometric ambiguity, where non-traversable structures such as furniture share local geometric properties with navigable ground. Furthermore, the computational cost of…
Sensorimotor contingency theory offers a promising account of the nature of perception, a topic rarely addressed in the robotics community. We propose a developmental framework to address the problem of the autonomous acquisition of…
Dynamic maneuvers for legged robots present a difficult challenge due to the complex dynamics and contact constraints. This paper introduces a versatile trajectory optimization framework for continuous-time multi-phase problems. We…