Related papers: Risk Assessment of an Autonomous Underwater Snake …
Exploring and navigating in extreme environments, such as caves, oceans, and planetary bodies, are often too hazardous for humans, and as such, robots are possible surrogates. These robots are met with significant locomotion challenges that…
Soft robots offer unmatched adaptability and safety in unstructured environments, yet their compliant, high-dimensional, and nonlinear dynamics make modeling for control notoriously difficult. Existing data-driven approaches often fail to…
Autonomous underwater robots are increasingly deployed for environmental monitoring, infrastructure inspection, subsea resource exploration, and long-horizon exploration. Yet, despite rapid advances in learning-based planning and control,…
As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance and gain influence, the development of embodied AI has accelerated, drawing significant attention, particularly in navigation scenarios. Embodied navigation requires an agent to perceive,…
To ensure safety in confined environments such as mines or subway tunnels, a (wireless) sensor network can be deployed to monitor various environmental conditions. One of its most important applications is to track personnel, mobile…
Snake robots have the potential to maneuver through tightly packed and complex environments. One challenge in enabling them to do so is the complexity in determining how to coordinate their many degrees-of-freedom to create purposeful…
The field of embodied AI (EAI) is rapidly advancing. Unlike virtual AI, EAI systems can exist in, learn from, reason about, and act in the physical world. With recent advances in AI models and hardware, EAI systems are becoming increasingly…
Long-term monitoring and exploration of extreme environments, such as underwater storage facilities, is costly, labor-intensive, and hazardous. Automating this process with low-cost, collaborative robots can greatly improve efficiency.…
Reinforcement learning is a widely used approach to autonomous navigation, showing potential in various tasks and robotic setups. Still, it often struggles to reach distant goals when safety constraints are imposed (e.g., the wheeled robot…
Accurate positioning of underwater robots in confined environments is crucial for inspection and mapping tasks and is also a prerequisite for autonomous operations. Presently, there are no positioning systems available that are suited for…
Autonomous robots used in infrastructure inspection, space exploration and other critical missions operate in highly dynamic environments. As such, they must continually verify their ability to complete the tasks associated with these…
The integration of vision-language-action (VLA) models into embodied AI (EAI) robots is rapidly advancing their ability to perform complex, long-horizon tasks in humancentric environments. However, EAI systems introduce critical security…
Robots operating alongside humans often encounter unfamiliar environments that make autonomous task completion challenging. Though improving models and increasing dataset size can enhance a robot's performance in unseen environments, data…
Autonomous navigation in unknown 3D environments is a key issue for intelligent transportation, while still being an open problem. Conventionally, navigation risk has been focused on mitigating collisions with obstacles, neglecting the…
Robotic fleets such as unmanned aerial and ground vehicles have been widely used for routine inspections of static environments, where the areas of interest are known and planned in advance. However, in many applications, such areas of…
This paper underscores the importance of environmental monitoring, and specifically of freshwater ecosystems, which play a critical role in sustaining life and global economy. Despite their importance, insufficient data availability…
Safe autonomous navigation is an essential and challenging problem for robots operating in highly unstructured or completely unknown environments. Under these conditions, not only robotic systems must deal with limited localisation…
This work addresses the coordination problem of multiple robots with the goal of finding specific hazardous targets in an unknown area and dealing with them cooperatively. The desired behaviour for the robotic system entails multiple…
Robots will bring search and rescue (SaR) in disaster response to another level, in case they can autonomously take over dangerous SaR tasks from humans. A main challenge for autonomous SaR robots is to safely navigate in cluttered…
Enabling robots to walk and run on yielding terrain is increasingly vital to endeavors ranging from disaster response to extraterrestrial exploration. While dynamic legged locomotion on rigid ground is challenging enough, yielding terrain…