Related papers: Asymptotically Optimal Ergodic Coverage on General…

Although a number of solutions exist for the problems of coverage, search and target localization---commonly addressed separately---whether there exists a unified strategy that addresses these objectives in a coherent manner without being…

We present a method for image-guided exploration for mobile robotic systems. Our approach extends ergodic exploration methods, a recent exploration approach that prioritizes complete coverage of a space, with the use of a learned image…

Path planning for robotic coverage is the task of determining a collision-free robot trajectory that observes all points of interest in an environment. Robots employed for such tasks are often capable of exercising active control over…

Exploration is a fundamental problem in robot autonomy. A major limitation, however, is that during exploration robots oftentimes have to rely on on-board systems alone for state estimation, accumulating significant drift over time in large…

We provide the first step toward developing a hierarchical control-estimation framework to actively plan robot trajectories for anomaly detection in confined spaces. The space is represented globally using a directed region graph, where a…

Autonomous robots are increasingly deployed for long-term information-gathering tasks, which pose two key challenges: planning informative trajectories in environments that evolve across space and time, and ensuring persistent operation…

We consider the problem of combining potential field and ergodic search on multi-robot systems. Traditional ergodic search algorithms use metrics for ergodicity that account for the desired distribution at different scales. Recently, a heat…

We study the optimization of ergodic averages for multi-valued dynamical systems, i.e. where points may have multiple different forward orbits. Under upper semi-continuity assumptions, we show that the maximum space average with respect to…

This paper presents a whole-body robot control method for exploring and probing a given region of interest. The ergodic control formalism behind such an exploration behavior consists of matching the time-averaged statistics of a robot…

Ergodic exploration has spawned a lot of interest in mobile robotics due to its ability to design time trajectories that match desired spatial coverage statistics. However, current ergodic approaches are for continuous spaces, which require…

Autonomous sailboats are well suited for long-duration ocean observation due to their wind-driven endurance. However, their performance is highly anisotropic and strongly influenced by inhomogeneous and time-varying wind and current fields,…

Ergodic Optimization is the process of finding invariant probability measures that maximize the integral of a given function. It has been conjectured that "most" functions are optimized by measures supported on a periodic orbit, and it has…

Large-scale environmental sensing with a finite number of mobile sensors is a challenging task that requires a lot of resources and time. This is especially true when features in the environment are spatiotemporally changing with unknown or…

We propose a novel autonomous robotic palpation framework for real-time elastic mapping during tissue exploration using a viscoelastic tissue model. The method combines force-based parameter estimation using a commercial force/torque sensor…

Planning informative trajectories while considering the spatial distribution of the information over the environment, as well as constraints such as the robot's limited battery capacity, makes the long-time horizon persistent coverage…

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…

Autonomous exploration in unknown environments typically relies on onboard state estimation for localisation and mapping. Existing exploration methods primarily maximise coverage efficiency, but often overlook that visual-inertial odometry…

This work presents an innovative solution for robotic odometry, path planning and exploration in wild unknown environments, focusing on digital modelling. The approach uses a minimum cost formulation with pseudo-randomly generated…

In this paper, we study the problem of coverage planning by a mobile robot with a limited energy budget. The objective of the robot is to cover every point in the environment while minimizing the traveled path length. The environment is…

This research addresses the challenge of executing multi-UAV survey missions over diverse terrains characterized by varying elevations. The approach integrates advanced two-dimensional ergodic search technique with model predictive control…