Related papers: Safe Active Navigation and Exploration for Planeta…
This study proposes an integrated task and motion planning method for dynamic locomotion in partially observable environments with multi-level safety guarantees. This layered planning framework is composed of a high-level symbolic task…
(Simplified Abstract) To accomplish breakthroughs in dynamic whole-body locomotion, legged robots have to be terrain aware. Terrain-Aware Locomotion (TAL) implies that the robot can perceive the terrain with its sensors, and can take…
Learning has propelled the cutting edge of performance in robotic control to new heights, allowing robots to operate with high performance in conditions that were previously unimaginable. The majority of the work, however, assumes that the…
This paper introduces the Terrain Recognition And Contact Force Estimation Paw, a compact and sensorized shoe designed for legged robots. The paw end-effector is made of silicon that deforms upon the application of contact forces, while an…
This paper presents a novel strategy for autonomous teamed exploration of subterranean environments using legged and aerial robots. Tailored to the fact that subterranean settings, such as cave networks and underground mines, often involve…
The ability to perform locomotion in various terrains is critical for legged robots. However, the robot has to have a better understanding of the surface it is walking on to perform robust locomotion on different terrains. Animals and…
Legged robot locomotion on sand slopes is challenging due to the complex dynamics of granular media and how the lack of solid surfaces can hinder locomotion. A promising strategy, inspired by ghost crabs and other organisms in nature, is to…
Many robots move through the world by composing locomotion primitives like steps and turns. To do so well, robots need not have primitives that make intuitive sense to humans. This becomes of paramount importance when robots are damaged and…
Natural environments pose significant challenges for autonomous robot navigation, particularly due to their unstructured and ever-changing nature. Hiking trails, with their dynamic conditions influenced by weather, vegetation, and human…
As legged robots are deployed in industrial and autonomous construction tasks requiring collaborative manipulation, they must handle object manipulation while maintaining stable locomotion. The challenge intensifies in real-world…
What is a good visual representation for autonomous agents? We address this question in the context of semantic visual navigation, which is the problem of a robot finding its way through a complex environment to a target object, e.g. go to…
We introduce GEOTACT, the first robotic system capable of grasping and retrieving objects of potentially unknown shapes buried in a granular environment. While important in many applications, ranging from mining and exploration to search…
Legged robots can traverse challenging terrain, use perception to plan their safe foothold positions, and navigate the environment. Such unique mobility capabilities make these platforms a perfect candidate for scenarios such as search and…
Heterogeneous multi-robot systems are advantageous for operations in unknown environments because functionally specialised robots can gather environmental information, while others perform tasks. We define this decomposition as the…
The fast-growing demand for fully autonomous aerial operations in shared spaces necessitates developing trustworthy agents that can safely and seamlessly navigate in crowded, dynamic spaces. In this work, we propose Social Robot Tree Search…
In ground-view object change detection, the recently emerging mapless navigation has great potential to navigate a robot to objects distantly detected (e.g., books, cups, clothes) and acquire high-resolution object images, to identify their…
Uncertainty-aware robot motion prediction is crucial for downstream traversability estimation and safe autonomous navigation in unstructured, off-road environments, where terrain is heterogeneous and perceptual uncertainty is high. Most…
Being able to estimate the traversability of the area surrounding a mobile robot is a fundamental task in the design of a navigation algorithm. However, the task is often complex, since it requires evaluating distances from obstacles, type…
Language-guided active sensing is a robotics subtask where a robot with an onboard sensor interacts efficiently with the environment via object manipulation to maximize perceptual information, following given language instructions. These…
Metric ground navigation addresses the problem of autonomously moving a robot from one point to another in an obstacle-occupied planar environment in a collision-free manner. It is one of the most fundamental capabilities of intelligent…