Related papers: Data-Driven Terramechanics Approach Towards a Real…
Simulators are a critical component of modern robotics research. Strategies for both perception and decision making can be studied in simulation first before deployed to real world systems, saving on time and costs. Despite significant…
This thesis presents a unified modeling and simulation framework for analyzing sidewinding and tumbling locomotion of the COBRA snake robot across rigid, compliant, and granular terrains. A contact-implicit formulation is used to model…
In recent years, aerial platforms have evolved from passive flying sensors into versatile, contact-aware robotic systems, leading to rapid advances in platform design. Standard coplanar and collinear quadrotors have been complemented by…
Future Mars missions will require advanced guidance, navigation, and control algorithms for the powered descent phase to target specific surface locations and achieve pinpoint accuracy (landing error ellipse $<$ 5 m radius). The latter…
Flexible spacecraft structures present significant challenges for physical and control system design due to nonlinear dynamics, mission constraints, environmental variables, and changing operational conditions. This paper presents a…
Marker-based landing is widely used in drone delivery and return-to-base systems for its simplicity and reliability. However, most approaches assume idealized landing site visibility and sensor performance, limiting robustness in complex…
Sim-to-real transfer is a fundamental challenge in robot reinforcement learning. Discrepancies between simulation and reality can significantly impair policy performance, especially if it receives high-dimensional inputs such as dense depth…
Existing evaluation paradigms for Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) face critical limitations. Real-world evaluation is often challenging due to safety concerns and a lack of reproducibility, whereas closed-loop simulation can face insufficient…
Surface runoff shapes planetary landscapes, but global hydrological models often lack the resolution and flexibility to simulate dynamic surface water bodies beyond Earth. Recent studies of Mars have revealed abundant geological and…
The harsh environment on the lunar surface presents unique technological challenges for space exploration. This paper presents research on the design and development of the Tele- scope-deployment High-vacuum teleOperated Rover (THOR),…
We tackle the problem of producing realistic simulations of LiDAR point clouds, the sensor of preference for most self-driving vehicles. We argue that, by leveraging real data, we can simulate the complex world more realistically compared…
The usage of environment sensor models for virtual testing is a promising approach to reduce the testing effort of autonomous driving. However, in order to deduce any statements regarding the performance of an autonomous driving function…
The success of reinforcement learning (RL)-based control in tokamaks, an emerging technique for controlled nuclear fusion with improved flexibility, typically requires substantial interaction with a simulator capable of accurately evolving…
Data-driven simulation of pedestrian dynamics is an incipient and promising approach for building reliable microscopic pedestrian models. We propose a methodology based on generalized regression neural networks, which does not have to deal…
The scalability of robotic learning is fundamentally bottlenecked by the significant cost and labor of real-world data collection. While simulated data offers a scalable alternative, it often fails to generalize to the real world due to…
The visual detection and tracking of surface terrain is required for spacecraft to safely land on or navigate within close proximity to celestial objects. Current approaches rely on template matching with pre-gathered patch-based features,…
This paper investigates how the performance of visual navigation policies trained in simulation compares to policies trained with real-world data. Performance degradation of simulator-trained policies is often significant when they are…
If we want to train robots in simulation before deploying them in reality, it seems natural and almost self-evident to presume that reducing the sim2real gap involves creating simulators of increasing fidelity (since reality is what it is).…
In the future, extraterrestrial expeditions will not only be conducted by rovers but also by flying robots. The technical demonstration drone Ingenuity, that just landed on Mars, will mark the beginning of a new era of exploration…
The European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Space Resources Innovation Centre (ESRIC) created the Space Resources Challenge to invite researchers and companies to propose innovative solutions for Multi-Robot Systems (MRS) space…