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Non-prehensile manipulation using onboard sensing presents a fundamental challenge: the manipulated object occludes the sensor's field of view, creating occluded regions that can lead to collisions. We propose CURA-PPO, a reinforcement…
This work contributes a marsupial robotic system-of-systems involving a legged and an aerial robot capable of collaborative mapping and exploration path planning that exploits the heterogeneous properties of the two systems and the ability…
Learning strategic robot behavior -- like that required in pursuit-evasion interactions -- under real-world constraints is extremely challenging. It requires exploiting the dynamics of the interaction, and planning through both physical…
Nowadays service robots are leaving the structured and completely known environments and entering human-centric settings. For these robots, object perception and grasping are two challenging tasks due to the high demand for accurate and…
Real-time occlusion handling is a major problem in outdoor mixed reality system because it requires great computational cost mainly due to the complexity of the scene. Using only segmentation, it is difficult to accurately render a virtual…
Passive deformation due to compliance is a commonly used benefit of soft robots, providing opportunities to achieve robust actuation with few active degrees of freedom. Soft growing robots in particular have shown promise in navigation of…
A mobile robot represented by a point moving in the plane has to explore an unknown terrain with obstacles. Both the terrain and the obstacles are modeled as arbitrary polygons. We consider two scenarios: the unlimited vision, when the…
Navigation and inspection in confined environments, such as tunnels and pipes, pose significant challenges for existing robots due to limitations in maneuverability and adaptability to varying geometries. Vine robots, which are soft growing…
We consider the task of underwater robot navigation for the purpose of collecting scientifically relevant video data for environmental monitoring. The majority of field robots that currently perform monitoring tasks in unstructured natural…
Humans can perform parkour by traversing obstacles in a highly dynamic fashion requiring precise eye-muscle coordination and movement. Getting robots to do the same task requires overcoming similar challenges. Classically, this is done by…
For successful deployment of robots in multifaceted situations, an understanding of the robot for its environment is indispensable. With advancing performance of state-of-the-art object detectors, the capability of robots to detect objects…
One of the long-term challenges of robotics is to enable robots to interact with humans in the visual world via natural language, as humans are visual animals that communicate through language. Overcoming this challenge requires the ability…
The quality of robot vision greatly affects the performance of automation systems, where occlusions stand as one of the biggest challenges. If the target is occluded from the sensor, detecting and grasping such objects become very…
Many of today's robot perception systems aim at accomplishing perception tasks that are too simplistic and too hard. They are too simplistic because they do not require the perception systems to provide all the information needed to…
This paper addresses the problem of mobile grasping in dynamic, unknown environments where a robot must operate under a limited field-of-view. The fundamental challenge is the inherent trade-off between ``seeing'' around to reduce…
Volumetric objectives for exploration and perception tasks seek to capture a sense of value (or reward) for hypothetical observations at one or more camera views for robots operating in unknown environments. For example, a volumetric…
Visually-guided underwater robots are deployed alongside human divers for cooperative exploration, inspection, and monitoring tasks in numerous shallow-water and coastal-water applications. The most essential capability of such companion…
This paper addresses object perception applied to mobile robotics. Being able to perceive semantically meaningful objects in unstructured environments is a key capability in order to make robots suitable to perform high-level tasks in home…
Mobile service robots are increasingly prevalent in human-centric, real-world domains, operating autonomously in unconstrained indoor environments. In such a context, robotic vision plays a central role in enabling service robots to…
Evolutionary Robotics allows robots with limited sensors and processing to tackle complex tasks by means of sensory-motor coordination. In this paper we show the first application of the Behaviour Tree framework to a real robotic platform…