Related papers: GuangMing-Explorer: A Four-Legged Robot Platform f…

Continuous exploration without interruption is important in scenarios such as search and rescue and precision agriculture, where consistent presence is needed to detect events over large areas. Ergodic search already derives continuous…

Exploration of unknown space with an autonomous mobile robot is a well-studied problem. In this work we broaden the scope of exploration, moving beyond the pure geometric goal of uncovering as much free space as possible. We believe that…

Conventional algorithms in autonomous exploration face challenges due to their inability to accurately and efficiently identify the spatial distribution of convex regions in the real-time map. These methods often prioritize navigation…

Intrinsically motivated goal exploration processes enable agents to autonomously sample goals to explore efficiently complex environments with high-dimensional continuous actions. They have been applied successfully to real world robots to…

The growing global demand for critical raw materials (CRMs) has highlighted the need to access difficult and hazardous environments such as abandoned underground mines. These sites pose significant challenges for conventional machinery and…

Autonomous exploration is a widely studied fundamental application in the field of quadrotors, which requires them to automatically explore unknown space to obtain complete information about the environment. The frontier-based method, which…

Quantifying greenhouse-gases (GHG) in wetlands is critical for climate modeling and restoration assessment, yet manual sampling is labor-intensive, and time demanding. We present WetExplorer, an autonomous tracked robot that automates the…

In this paper, we present a framework for real-time autonomous robot navigation based on cloud and on-demand databases to address two major issues of human-like robot interaction and task planning in global dynamic environment, which is not…

In this paper, we present an autonomous navigation system for goal-driven exploration of unknown environments through deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Points of interest (POI) for possible navigation directions are obtained from the…

Navigating a large-scaled robot in unknown and cluttered height-constrained environments is challenging. Not only is a fast and reliable planning algorithm required to go around obstacles, the robot should also be able to change its…

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…

Information exploration tasks are inherently complex, ill-structured, and involve sequences of actions usually spread over many sessions. When exploring a dataset, users tend to experiment higher degrees of uncertainty, mostly raised by…

A wide range of human-robot collaborative applications in diverse domains such as manufacturing, health care, the entertainment industry, and social interactions, require an autonomous robot to follow its human companion. Different working…

Autonomous exploration in unknown environments using mobile robots is the pillar of many robotic applications. Existing exploration frameworks either select the nearest geometric frontier or the nearest information-theoretic frontier.…

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,…

Thanks to the efforts of the robotics and autonomous systems community, robots are becoming ever more capable. There is also an increasing demand from end-users for autonomous service robots that can operate in real environments for…

We present a novel system, AdVENTR for autonomous robot navigation in unstructured outdoor environments that consist of uneven and vegetated terrains. Our approach is general and can enable both wheeled and legged robots to handle outdoor…

Modern AAA video games feature huge game levels and maps which are increasingly hard for level testers to cover exhaustively. As a result, games often ship with catastrophic bugs such as the player falling through the floor or being stuck…

There are several challenges for search and rescue robots: mobility, perception, autonomy, and communication. Inspired by the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge, we propose an autonomous blimp robot, which has the advantages of low power…

Perceiving the surrounding environment is crucial for autonomous mobile robots. An elevation map provides a memory-efficient and simple yet powerful geometric representation for ground robots. The robots can use this information for…