Related papers: Safe Active Navigation and Exploration for Planeta…
In critical applications, including search-and-rescue in degraded environments, blockages can be prevalent and prevent the effective deployment of certain sensing modalities, particularly vision, due to occlusion and the constrained range…
Terrain-aware locomotion has become an emerging topic in legged robotics. However, it is hard to generate diverse, challenging, and realistic unstructured terrains in simulation, which limits the way researchers evaluate their locomotion…
The advancement of robotics and autonomous navigation systems hinges on the ability to accurately predict terrain traversability. Traditional methods for generating datasets to train these prediction models often involve putting robots into…
General robot manipulation requires the handling of previously unseen objects. Learning a physically accurate model at test time can provide significant benefits in data efficiency, predictability, and reuse between tasks. Tactile sensing…
To safely navigate unknown environments, robots must accurately perceive dynamic obstacles. Instead of directly measuring the scene depth with a LiDAR sensor, we explore the use of a much cheaper and higher resolution sensor: programmable…
Estimating terrain traversability in off-road environments requires reasoning about complex interaction dynamics between the robot and these terrains. However, it is challenging to create informative labels to learn a model in a supervised…
Mobile robot navigation is typically regarded as a geometric problem, in which the robot's objective is to perceive the geometry of the environment in order to plan collision-free paths towards a desired goal. However, a purely geometric…
Legged robots have the potential to traverse complex terrain and access confined spaces beyond the reach of traditional platforms thanks to their ability to carefully select footholds and flexibly adapt their body posture while walking.…
For autonomous robots navigating in urban environments, it is important for the robot to stay on the designated path of travel (i.e., the footpath), and avoid areas such as grass and garden beds, for safety and social conformity…
The dynamic response of the legged robot locomotion is non-Lipschitz and can be stochastic due to environmental uncertainties. To test, validate, and characterize the safety performance of legged robots, existing solutions on observed and…
Accurate traversability estimation using an online dense terrain map is crucial for safe navigation in challenging environments like construction and disaster areas. However, traversability estimation for legged robots on rough terrains…
We introduce the novel task of interactive scene exploration, wherein robots autonomously explore environments and produce an action-conditioned scene graph (ACSG) that captures the structure of the underlying environment. The ACSG accounts…
We tackle the problem of perceptive locomotion in dynamic environments. In this problem, a quadrupedal robot must exhibit robust and agile walking behaviors in response to environmental clutter and moving obstacles. We present a…
Active visual SLAM finds a wide array of applications in GNSS-Denied sub-terrain environments and outdoor environments for ground robots. To achieve robust localization and mapping accuracy, it is imperative to incorporate the perception…
Accurate traversability estimation is essential for safe and effective navigation of outdoor robots operating in complex environments. This paper introduces a novel experience-based method that allows robots to autonomously learn which…
This work focuses on the problem of visual target navigation, which is very important for autonomous robots as it is closely related to high-level tasks. To find a special object in unknown environments, classical and learning-based…
Perception is necessary for autonomous navigation in an unknown area crowded with obstacles. It's challenging for a robot to navigate safely without any sensors that can sense the environment, resulting in a $\textit{blind}$ robot, and…
Safe autonomous navigation requires reliable estimation of environmental traversability. Traditional methods have relied on semantic or geometry-based approaches with human-defined thresholds, but these methods often yield unreliable…
Terrain analysis is critical for the practical ap- plication of ground mobile robots in real-world tasks, espe- cially in outdoor unstructured environments. In this paper, we propose a novel spatial-temporal traversability assessment…
Proprioceptive localization refers to a new class of robot egocentric localization methods that do not rely on the perception and recognition of external landmarks. These methods are naturally immune to bad weather, poor lighting…