Related papers: Proprioceptive Safe Active Navigation and Explorat…
Safe autonomous exploration of unknown environments is an essential skill for mobile robots to effectively and adaptively perform environmental mapping for diverse critical tasks. Due to its simplicity, most existing exploration methods…
Legged robots can traverse a wide variety of terrains, some of which may be challenging for wheeled robots, such as stairs or highly uneven surfaces. However, quadruped robots face stability challenges on slippery surfaces. This can be…
Recognition of human actions and associated interactions with objects and the environment is an important problem in computer vision due to its potential applications in a variety of domains. The most versatile methods can generalize to…
Hazard detection is critical for enabling autonomous landing on planetary surfaces. Current state-of-the-art methods leverage traditional computer vision approaches to automate the identification of safe terrain from input digital elevation…
Autonomous navigation in unstructured vegetated environments remains an open challenge. To successfully operate in these settings, ground vehicles must assess the traversability of the environment and determine which vegetation is pliable…
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…
Legged robots leverage ground contacts and the reaction forces they provide to achieve agile locomotion. However, uncertainty coupled with contact discontinuities can lead to failure, especially in real-world environments with unexpected…
Soft robots offer unmatched adaptability and safety in unstructured environments, yet their compliant, high-dimensional, and nonlinear dynamics make modeling for control notoriously difficult. Existing data-driven approaches often fail to…
We study the problem of bipedal robot navigation in complex environments with uncertain and rough terrain. In particular, we consider a scenario in which the robot is expected to reach a desired goal location by traversing an environment…
Snake robots have the potential to maneuver through tightly packed and complex environments. One challenge in enabling them to do so is the complexity in determining how to coordinate their many degrees-of-freedom to create purposeful…
Traversability assessment of deformable terrain is vital for safe rover navigation on planetary surfaces. Machine learning (ML) is a powerful tool for traversability prediction but faces predictive uncertainty. This uncertainty leads to…
Terrain analysis is critical for the practical ap- plication of ground mobile robots in real-world tasks, espe- cially in outdoor unstructured environments. In this paper, we propose a novel spatial-temporal traversability assessment…
This work developed a learning framework for perceptive legged locomotion that combines visual feedback, proprioceptive information, and active gait regulation of foot-ground contacts. The perception requires only one forward-facing camera…
Collapsing terrains, often present in search and rescue missions or planetary exploration, pose significant challenges for quadruped robots. This paper introduces a robust locomotion framework for safe navigation over unstable surfaces by…
Legged robot navigation in extreme environments can hinder the use of cameras and laser scanners due to darkness, air obfuscation or sensor damage. In these conditions, proprioceptive sensing will continue to work reliably. In this paper,…
Autonomous robots must navigate reliably in unknown environments even under compromised exteroceptive perception, or perception failures. Such failures often occur when harsh environments lead to degraded sensing, or when the perception…
We present semi-supervised deep learning approaches for traversability estimation from fisheye images. Our method, GONet, and the proposed extensions leverage Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to effectively predict whether the area…
We tackle the problem of perceptive locomotion in dynamic environments. In this problem, a quadrupedal robot must exhibit robust and agile walking behaviors in response to environmental clutter and moving obstacles. We present a…
Dynamic locomotion in rough terrain requires accurate foot placement, collision avoidance, and planning of the underactuated dynamics of the system. Reliably optimizing for such motions and interactions in the presence of imperfect and…
Exploration of unknown, unstructured environments, such as in search and rescue, cave exploration, and planetary missions,presents significant challenges due to their unpredictable nature. This unpredictability can lead to inefficient path…