Related papers: Enhancing UAV Search under Occlusion using Next Be…

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…

Autonomous aerial scanning of target structures is crucial for practical applications, requiring online adaptation to unknown obstacles during flight. Existing methods largely emphasize collision avoidance and efficiency, but overlook…

This article considers a cooperative vehicle routing problem for an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance mission in the presence of communication constraints between the vehicles. The proposed framework uses a ground vehicle and…

Reasons for mapping an unknown environment with autonomous robots are wide-ranging, but in practice, they are often overlooked when developing planning strategies. Rapid information gathering and comprehensive structural assessment of…

This work addresses the problem of coupling vision-based navigation systems for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with robust obstacle avoidance capabilities. The former problem is solved by maximizing the visibility of the points of…

Heuristic search is a powerful approach that has successfully been applied to a broad class of planning problems, including classical planning, multi-objective planning, and probabilistic planning modelled as a stochastic shortest path…

This paper investigates the localization problem of high-speed high-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with a monocular camera and inertial navigation system. It proposes a navigation method utilizing the complementarity of vision and…

Inspecting indoor environments such as tunnels, industrial facilities, and construction sites is essential for infrastructure monitoring and maintenance. While manual inspection in these environments is often time-consuming and potentially…

Autonomous exploration is a fundamental problem for various applications of unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs). Existing methods, however, are demonstrated to static local optima and two-dimensional exploration. To address these challenges,…

Autonomous exploration in unknown environments typically relies on onboard state estimation for localisation and mapping. Existing exploration methods primarily maximise coverage efficiency, but often overlook that visual-inertial odometry…

During a wildfire, the work of the aerial coordinator is crucial for the control of the wildfire and the minimization of the burned area and the damage caused. Since it could be very useful for the coordinator to have decision-making tools…

In this paper, the trajectory planning problem for autonomous rendezvous and docking between a controlled spacecraft and a tumbling target is addressed. The use of a variable planning horizon is proposed in order to construct an appropriate…

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) path planning algorithms often assume a knowledge reward function or priority map, indicating the most important areas to visit. In this paper we propose a method to create priority maps for monitoring or…

Search and detection of objects on the ocean surface is a challenging task due to the complexity of the drift dynamics and lack of known optimal solutions for the path of the search agents. This challenge was highlighted by the unsuccessful…

Active target sensing is the task of discovering and classifying an unknown number of targets in an environment and is critical in search-and-rescue missions. This paper develops a deep reinforcement learning approach to plan informative…

The task of establishing and maintaining situational awareness in an unknown environment is a critical step to fulfil in a mission related to the field of rescue robotics. Predominantly, the problem of visual inspection of urban structures…

Path planning is an important component in any highly automated vehicle system. In this report, the general problem of path planning is considered first in partially known static environments where only static obstacles are present but the…

This paper addresses a UAV path planning task that seeks to observe a set of objects while satisfying the observation quality constraint. A dynamic programming algorithm is proposed that enables the UAV to observe the target objects with…

This paper addresses the problem of autonomous UAV search missions, where a UAV must locate specific Entities of Interest (EOIs) within a time limit, based on brief descriptions in large, hazard-prone environments with keep-out zones. The…

In this paper, we give a double twist to the problem of planning under uncertainty. State-of-the-art planners seek to minimize the localization uncertainty by only considering the geometric structure of the scene. In this paper, we argue…