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The rise of embodied AI applications has enabled robots to perform complex tasks which require a sophisticated understanding of their environment. To enable successful robot operation in such settings, maps must be constructed so that they…
In this paper, we propose a method that, given a partial grid map of an indoor environment built by an autonomous mobile robot, estimates the amount of the explored area represented in the map, as well as whether the uncovered part is still…
Reliable aerial grasping in cluttered environments remains challenging due to occlusions and collision risks. Existing aerial manipulation pipelines largely rely on centroid-based grasping and lack integration between the grasp pose…
In this work we study the problem of exploring surfaces and building compact 3D representations of the environment surrounding a robot through active perception. We propose an online probabilistic framework that merges visual and tactile…
Despite the attention that the problem of path planning for tethered robots has garnered in the past few decades, the approaches proposed to solve it typically rely on a discrete representation of the configuration space and do not exploit…
Optimization in engineering requires appropriate models. In this article, a regression method for enhancing the predictive power of a model by exploiting expert knowledge in the form of shape constraints, or more specifically, monotonicity…
Grasping in a densely cluttered environment is a challenging task for robots. Previous methods tried to solve this problem by actively gathering multiple views before grasp pose generation. However, they either overlooked the importance of…
This paper describes an approach to automatically extracting floor plans from the kinds of incomplete measurements that could be acquired by an autonomous mobile robot. The approach proceeds by reasoning about extended structural layout…
This paper presents a sampling-based motion planning framework that leverages the geometry of obstacles in a workspace as well as prior experiences from motion planning problems. Previous studies have demonstrated the benefits of utilizing…
We present a sampling-based approach to reasoning about the caging-based manipulation of rigid and a simplified class of deformable 3D objects subject to energy constraints. Towards this end, we propose the notion of soft fixtures extending…
The area coverage problem is the task of efficiently servicing a given two-dimensional surface using sensors mounted on robots such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). We present a novel formulation for…
Autonomous robots have real-world applications in diverse fields, such as mobile manipulation and environmental exploration, and many such tasks benefit from a hands-off approach in terms of human user involvement over a long task horizon.…
Accurately modeling local surface properties of objects is crucial to many robotic applications, from grasping to material recognition. Surface properties like friction are however difficult to estimate, as visual observation of the object…
Calibration methods have been widely studied in survey sampling over the last decades. Viewing calibration as an inverse problem, we extend the calibration technique by using a maximum entropy method. Finding the optimal weights is achieved…
To economically deploy robotic manipulators the programming and execution of robot motions must be swift. To this end, we propose a novel, constraint-based method to intuitively specify sequential manipulation tasks and to compute…
The choice of a grasp plays a critical role in the success of downstream manipulation tasks. Consider a task of placing an object in a cluttered scene; the majority of possible grasps may not be suitable for the desired placement. In this…
Multirobot systems for covering environments are increasingly used in applications like cleaning, industrial inspection, patrolling, and precision agriculture. The problem of covering a given environment using multiple robots can be…
Sampling-based motion planning techniques have emerged as an efficient algorithmic paradigm for solving complex motion planning problems. These approaches use a set of probing samples to construct an implicit graph representation of the…
When planning motions in a configuration space that has underlying symmetries (e.g. when manipulating one or multiple symmetric objects), the ideal planning algorithm should take advantage of those symmetries to produce shorter…
This paper presents an enhanced direct-method-based approach for the real-time solution of optimal control problems to handle path constraints, such as obstacles. The principal contributions of this work are twofold: first, the existing…