Related papers: Beyond Geometry: Efficient Topologically-Grounded …
We present SurfCut, an algorithm for extracting a smooth, simple surface with an unknown 3D curve boundary from a noisy 3D image and a seed point. Our method is built on the novel observation that certain ridge curves of a function defined…
We present TOPGN, a novel method for real-time transparent obstacle detection for robot navigation in unknown environments. We use a multi-layer 2D grid map representation obtained by summing the intensities of lidar point clouds that lie…
Mobile robots navigating in indoor and outdoor environments must be able to identify and avoid unsafe terrain. Although a significant amount of work has been done on the detection of standing obstacles (solid obstructions), not much work…
For a multi-robot team that collaboratively explores an unknown environment, it is of vital importance that collected information is efficiently shared among robots in order to support exploration and navigation tasks. Practical constraints…
The deployment of autonomous service robots in human-centric environments is hindered by a critical gap in perception and planning. Traditional navigation systems rely on expensive LiDARs that, while geometrically precise, are semantically…
Autonomous robots operating in dynamic environments must maintain beliefs over a hypothesis space that is rich enough to represent the activities of interest at different scales. This is important both in order to accommodate the…
Reticular structures form the backbone of major infrastructure like bridges, pylons, and airports, but their inspection and maintenance are costly and hazardous, often requiring human intervention. While prior research has focused on fault…
Recent results suggest that splitting topological navigation into robot-independent and robot-specific components improves navigation performance by enabling the robot-independent part to be trained with data collected by robots of…
While 2D occupancy maps commonly used in mobile robotics enable safe navigation in indoor environments, in order for robots to understand and interact with their environment and its inhabitants representing 3D geometry and semantic…
Mobile robots require comprehensive scene understanding to operate effectively in diverse environments, enriched with contextual information such as layouts, objects, and their relationships. Although advances like neural radiation fields…
Popular navigation stacks implemented on top of open-source frameworks such as ROS(Robot Operating System) and ROS2 represent the robot workspace using a discretized 2D occupancy grid. This method, while requiring less computation,…
Robot navigation traditionally relies on building an explicit map that is used to plan collision-free trajectories to a desired target. In deformable, complex terrain, using geometric-based approaches can fail to find a path due to…
Legged robots possess inherent advantages in traversing complex 3D terrains. However, previous work on low-cost quadruped robots with egocentric vision systems has been limited by a narrow front-facing view and exteroceptive noise,…
Multi-robot navigation in unknown, structurally constrained, and GPS-denied environments presents a fundamental trade-off between global strategic foresight and local tactical agility, particularly under limited communication. Centralized…
Navigation is a fundamental capability for mobile robots. While the current trend is to use learning-based approaches to replace traditional geometry-based methods, existing end-to-end learning-based policies often struggle with 3D spatial…
Ground robots which are able to navigate a variety of terrains are needed in many domains. One of the key aspects is the capability to adapt to the ground structure, which can be realized through movable body parts coming along with…
Many robotics applications benefit from being able to compute multiple locally optimal paths in a given configuration space. Examples include path planning for of tethered robots with cable-length constraints, systems involving cables,…
Visual robot navigation within large-scale, semi-structured environments deals with various challenges such as computation intensive path planning algorithms or insufficient knowledge about traversable spaces. Moreover, many…
Autonomous robots exploring unknown environments face a significant challenge: navigating effectively without prior maps and with limited external feedback. This challenge intensifies in sparse reward environments, where traditional…
Robots operate in environments with varying implicit structure. For instance, a helicopter flying over terrain encounters a very different arrangement of obstacles than a robotic arm manipulating objects on a cluttered table top.…