Related papers: Enabling Autonomous Navigation in a Snake Robot th…
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…
In this paper, we present an active visual SLAM approach for omnidirectional robots. The goal is to generate control commands that allow such a robot to simultaneously localize itself and map an unknown environment while maximizing the…
This paper considers the problem of safe autonomous navigation in unknown environments, relying on local obstacle sensing. We consider a control-affine nonlinear robot system subject to bounded input noise and rely on feedback linearization…
Advances in planetary robotics have led to wheeled robots that have beamed back invaluable science data from the surface of the Moon and Mars. However, these large wheeled robots are unable to access rugged environments such as cliffs,…
This work proposes a novel transformation termed the conformal navigation transformation to achieve collision-free navigation of a robot in a workspace populated with arbitrary polygonal obstacles. The properties of the conformal navigation…
There are many spaces inaccessible to humans where robots could help deliver sensors and equipment. Many of these spaces contain three-dimensional passageways and uneven terrain that pose challenges for robot design and control. Everting…
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…
Consistent maps are key for most autonomous mobile robots, and they often use SLAM approaches to build such maps. Loop closures via place recognition help to maintain accurate pose estimates by mitigating global drift, and are thus key for…
Autonomous exploration of subterranean environments constitutes a major frontier for robotic systems as underground settings present key challenges that can render robot autonomy hard to achieve. This has motivated the DARPA Subterranean…
Visual robot navigation within large-scale, semi-structured environments deals with various challenges such as computation intensive path planning algorithms or insufficient knowledge about traversable spaces. Moreover, many…
This paper presents a safety-critical locomotion control framework for quadrupedal robots. Our goal is to enable quadrupedal robots to safely navigate in cluttered environments. To tackle this, we introduce exponential Discrete Control…
This study presents a modular, electronics-free, and fully onboard control and actuation approach for SMA-based soft robots to achieve locomotion tasks. This approach exploits the nonlinear mechanics of compliant curved beams and carefully…
This paper presents a vision guidance and control method for autonomous robotic capture and stabilization of orbital objects in a time-critical manner. The method takes into account various operational and physical constraints, including…
Autonomous exploration in unknown environments is key for mobile robots, helping them perceive, map, and make decisions in complex areas. However, current methods often rely on frequent global optimization, suffering from high computational…
This paper introduces a simulation study of fluid actuated multi-driven closed system as spherical mobile robot called "RollRoller". Robot's mechanism design consists of two essential parts: tubes to lead a core and mechanical controlling…
This systems paper presents the implementation and design of RB5, a wheeled robot for autonomous long-term exploration with fewer and cheaper sensors. Requiring just an RGB-D camera and low-power computing hardware, the system consists of…
Wheeled-legged robots have the potential for highly agile and versatile locomotion. The combination of legs and wheels might be a solution for any real-world application requiring rapid, and long-distance mobility skills on challenging…
Object-relative mobile robot navigation is essential for a variety of tasks, e.g. autonomous critical infrastructure inspection, but requires the capability to extract semantic information about the objects of interest from raw sensory…
We develop an autonomous navigation algorithm for a robot operating in two-dimensional environments cluttered with obstacles having arbitrary convex shapes. The proposed navigation approach relies on a hybrid feedback to guarantee global…
We examine the hypothesis, that short-term synaptic plasticity (STSP) may generate self-organized motor patterns. We simulated sphere-shaped autonomous robots, within the LPZRobots simulation package, containing three weights moving along…