Related papers: A Hough transform approach to safety-aware scalar …

Onboard terrain sensing and mapping for safe planetary landings often suffer from missed hazardous features, e.g., small rocks, due to the large observational range and the limited resolution of the obtained terrain data. To this end, this…

Collaborative navigation of heterogeneous robots in unknown environments poses significant challenges due to sensing, communication, and computational limitations. In this work, a lead robot navigates toward a target while a mobile sensor…

In the context of ground robot navigation in unstructured hazardous environments, the coupling of efficient path planning with an adequate environment representation is a crucial topic in order to guarantee the robot safety while ensuring…

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…

We propose a new frontier concept called the Gaussian Process Frontier (GP-Frontier) that can be used to locally navigate a robot towards a goal without building a map. The GP-Frontier is built on the uncertainty assessment of an efficient…

Autonomous robots operating in unstructured, safety-critical environments, from planetary exploration to warehouses and homes, must learn to safely navigate and interact with their surroundings despite limited prior knowledge. Current…

Level set methods underpin modern safety techniques such as control barrier functions (CBFs), while also serving as implicit surface representations for geometric shapes via distance fields. Inspired by these two paradigms, we propose a…

Multi-robot systems are essential for environmental monitoring, particularly for tracking spatial phenomena like pollution, soil minerals, and water salinity, and more. This study addresses the challenge of deploying a multi-robot team for…

This paper addresses multi-robot informative path planning (IPP) for environmental monitoring. The problem involves determining informative regions in the environment that should be visited by robots to gather the most information about the…

The ability to recognize previously mapped locations is an essential feature for autonomous systems. Unstructured planetary-like environments pose a major challenge to these systems due to the similarity of the terrain. As a result, the…

Modeling spatial processes that exhibit both smooth and rough features poses a significant challenge. This is especially true in fields where complex physical variables are observed across spatial domains. Traditional spatial techniques,…

Autonomous hazard detection and avoidance is a key technology for future landing missions in unknown surface conditions. Current state-of-the-art stochastic algorithms assume simple Gaussian measurement noise on dense, high-fidelity digital…

Safely landing on the lunar surface is a challenging task, especially in the heavily-shadowed South Pole region where traditional vision-based hazard detection methods are not reliable. The potential existence of valuable resources at the…

It is a challenging task for ground robots to autonomously navigate in harsh environments due to the presence of non-trivial obstacles and uneven terrain. This requires trajectory planning that balances safety and efficiency. The primary…

When an agent, person, vehicle or robot is moving through an unknown environment without GNSS signals, online mapping of nonlinear terrains can be used to improve position estimates when the agent returns to a previously mapped area.…

Exploring and modeling heterogeneous elastic surfaces requires multiple interactions with the environment and a complex selection of physical material parameters. The most common approaches model deformable properties from sets of offline…

Environmental monitoring robots often need to estimate data fields (e.g., salinity, temperature, bathymetry) under tight resource constraints. Classical boustrophedon lawnmower surveys provide geometric coverage guarantees but can waste…

We propose a novel angular velocity estimation method to increase the robustness of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) algorithms against gyroscope saturations induced by aggressive motions. Field robotics expose robots to various…

Mapping with uncertainty representation is required in many research domains, especially for localization. Although there are many investigations regarding the uncertainty of the pose estimation of an ego-robot with map information, the…

Most of the existing robotic exploration schemes use occupancy grid representations and geometric targets known as frontiers. The occupancy grid representation relies on the assumption of independence between grid cells and ignores…