Related papers: Multi-Depth Uniform Coverage Path Planning for Unm…
This report overviews a set of recent contributions in the field of path planning that were developed to enable the realization of the autonomous aerial robotic worker for inspection operations. The specific algorithmic contributions…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) represent a new frontier in a wide range of monitoring and research applications. To fully leverage their potential, a key challenge is planning missions for efficient data acquisition in complex…
This paper reports an investigation into the problem of rapid identification of a channel that crosses a body of water using one or more Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV). A new algorithm called Proposal Based Adaptive Channel Search (PBACS)…
Today, low-altitude fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are largely limited to primitively follow user-defined waypoints. To allow fully-autonomous remote missions in complex environments, real-time environment-aware navigation is…
When used by autonomous vehicles for trajectory planning or obstacle avoidance, depth estimation methods need to be reliable. Therefore, estimating the quality of the depth outputs is critical. In this paper, we show how M4Depth, a…
Environmental monitoring and surveying operations on rivers currently are performed primarily with manually-operated boats. In this domain, autonomous coverage of areas is of vital importance, for improving both the quality and the…
This paper proposes a novel mission planning platform, capable of efficiently deploying a team of UAVs to cover complex-shaped areas, in various remote sensing applications. Under the hood lies a novel optimization scheme for grid-based…
Critical maritime infrastructure increasingly demands situational awareness both above and below the surface, yet existing ''seabed-to-sky'' mapping pipelines either rely on GNSS (vulnerable to shadowing/spoofing) or expensive bathymetric…
In the context of autonomous robots, one of the most important tasks is to prevent potential damage to the robot during navigation. For this purpose, it is often assumed that one must deal with known probabilistic obstacles, then compute…
Planning the path to gather the surface information of the target objects is crucial to improve the efficiency of and reduce the overall cost, for visual inspection applications with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Coverage Path Planning…
We address the challenge of computing search paths in real-time for subsea applications where the goal is to locate an unknown number of targets on the seafloor. Our approach maximizes a formal definition of search effectiveness given…
In unknown non-convex environments, such as indoor and underground spaces, deploying a fleet of robots to explore the surroundings while simultaneously searching for and tracking targets of interest to maintain high-precision data…
Accurate reconstruction of the environment is a central goal of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems. However, the agent's trajectory can significantly affect estimation accuracy. This paper presents a new method to model…
Inspecting indoor environments such as tunnels, industrial facilities, and construction sites is essential for infrastructure monitoring and maintenance. While manual inspection in these environments is often time-consuming and potentially…
Underwater navigation presents several challenges, including unstructured unknown environments, lack of reliable localization systems (e.g., GPS), and poor visibility. Furthermore, good-quality obstacle detection sensors for underwater…
We present the first scene-update aerial path planning algorithm specifically designed for detecting and updating change areas in urban environments. While existing methods for large-scale 3D urban scene reconstruction focus on achieving…
Approximately seventy-one percent of the Earth is covered in water. Of that area, ninety-five percent of the ocean has never been explored or mapped. There are several engineering challenges that have prevented the exploration of the deep…
Autonomous exploration using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is essential for various tasks such as building inspections, rescue operations, deliveries, and warehousing. However, there are two main limitations to previous approaches: they…
For underwater vehicles, robotic applications have the added difficulty of operating in highly unstructured and dynamic environments. Environmental effects impact not only the dynamics and controls of the robot but also the perception and…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) spectral remote sensing technology is widely used in water quality monitoring. However, in dynamic environments, varying illumination conditions, such as shadows and specular reflection (sun glint), can cause…