Related papers: B-ActiveSEAL: Scalable Uncertainty-Aware Active Ex…

Active Position Estimation (APE) is the task of localizing one or more targets using one or more sensing platforms. APE is a key task for search and rescue missions, wildlife monitoring, source term estimation, and collaborative mobile…

Inspired by human behavior when traveling over unknown terrain, this study proposes the use of probing strategies and integrates them into a traversability analysis framework to address safe navigation on unknown rough terrain. Our…

Autonomous robots operating in dynamic environments must maintain beliefs over a hypothesis space that is rich enough to represent the activities of interest at different scales. This is important both in order to accommodate the…

Active localization is the problem of generating robot actions that allow it to maximally disambiguate its pose within a reference map. Traditional approaches to this use an information-theoretic criterion for action selection and…

In addition to the core tasks of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), active SLAM additionally in- volves generating robot actions that enable effective and efficient exploration of unknown environments. However, existing active…

This article presents a family of Stochastic Cartographic Occupancy Prediction Engines (SCOPEs) that enable mobile robots to predict the future states of complex dynamic environments. They do this by accounting for the motion of the robot…

Autonomous robots operating in large knowledgeintensive domains require planning in the discrete (task) space and the continuous (motion) space. In knowledge-intensive domains, on the one hand, robots have to reason at the highestlevel, for…

Terrestrial-aerial bimodal vehicles, which integrate the high mobility of aerial robots with the long endurance of ground robots, offer significant potential for autonomous exploration. Given the inherent energy and time constraints in…

Mobile robots have become indispensable for exploring hostile environments, such as in space or disaster relief scenarios, but often remain limited to teleoperation by a human operator. This restricts the deployment scale and requires…

In this article, we propose a novel navigation framework that leverages a two layered graph representation of the environment for efficient large-scale exploration, while it integrates a novel uncertainty awareness scheme to handle dynamic…

This paper presents a motion planning and risk analysis framework for enhancing human-robot collaboration with a Multi-Rotor Aerial Vehicle. The proposed method employs Signal Temporal Logic to encode key mission objectives, including…

Identifying uncertainty and taking mitigating actions is crucial for safe and trustworthy reinforcement learning agents, especially when deployed in high-risk environments. In this paper, risk sensitivity is promoted in a model-based…

Contextual policy search allows adapting robotic movement primitives to different situations. For instance, a locomotion primitive might be adapted to different terrain inclinations or desired walking speeds. Such an adaptation is often…

Rapid search and rescue is critical to maximizing survival rates following natural disasters. However, these efforts are challenged by the need to search large disaster zones, lack of reliability in the communications infrastructure, and a…

Deformable granular terrains introduce significant locomotion and immobilization risks in planetary exploration and are difficult to detect via remote sensing (e.g., vision). Legged robots can sense terrain properties through leg-terrain…

Robots can rapidly acquire new skills from demonstrations. However, during generalisation of skills or transitioning across fundamentally different skills, it is unclear whether the robot has the necessary knowledge to perform the task.…

Conventional active learning (AL) frameworks aim to reduce the cost of data annotation by actively requesting the labeling for the most informative data points. However, introducing AL to data hungry deep learning algorithms has been a…

The ability to accurately predict human behavior is central to the safety and efficiency of robot autonomy in interactive settings. Unfortunately, robots often lack access to key information on which these predictions may hinge, such as…

Underwater robot interventions require a high level of safety and reliability. A major challenge to address is a robust and accurate acquisition of localization estimates, as it is a prerequisite to enable more complex tasks, e.g. floating…

Autonomous robots are increasingly deployed for long-term information-gathering tasks, which pose two key challenges: planning informative trajectories in environments that evolve across space and time, and ensuring persistent operation…