Related papers: Beyond Geometry: Efficient Topologically-Grounded …
Autonomous navigation in extreme mountainous terrains poses challenges due to the presence of mobility-stressing elements and undulating surfaces, making it particularly difficult compared to conventional off-road driving scenarios. In such…
Autonomous locomotion for mobile ground robots in unstructured environments such as waypoint navigation or flipper control requires a sufficiently accurate prediction of the robot-terrain interaction. Heuristics like occupancy grids or…
City-scale 3D reconstruction from satellite imagery presents the challenge of extreme viewpoint extrapolation, where our goal is to synthesize ground-level novel views from sparse orbital images with minimal parallax. This requires…
Visual grounding aims to identify objects or regions in a scene based on natural language descriptions, essential for spatially aware perception in autonomous driving. However, existing visual grounding tasks typically depend on bounding…
Visual navigation in unknown environments based solely on natural language descriptions is a key capability for intelligent robots. In this work, we propose a navigation framework built upon off-the-shelf Visual Language Models (VLMs),…
We address the problem of efficient 3-D exploration in indoor environments for micro aerial vehicles with limited sensing capabilities and payload/power constraints. We develop an indoor exploration framework that uses learning to predict…
Wheeled robot navigation has been widely used in urban environments, but little research has been conducted on its navigation in wild vegetation. External sensors (LiDAR, camera etc.) are often used to construct point cloud map of the…
Household robots operate in the same space for years. Such robots incrementally build dynamic maps that can be used for tasks requiring remote object localization. However, benchmarks in robot learning often test generalization through…
Quadrotors hold significant promise for several applications such as agriculture, search and rescue, and infrastructure inspection. Achieving autonomous operation requires systems to navigate safely through complex and unfamiliar…
Ground robots navigating in complex, dynamic environments must compute collision-free trajectories to avoid obstacles safely and efficiently. Nonconvex optimization is a popular method to compute a trajectory in real-time. However, these…
Generative navigation policies have made rapid progress in improving end-to-end learned navigation. Despite their promising results, this paradigm has two structural problems. First, the sampled trajectories exist in an abstract, unscaled…
A hybrid map representation, which consists of a modified generalized Voronoi Diagram (GVD)-based topological map and a grid-based metric map, is proposed to facilitate a new frontier-driven exploration strategy. Exploration frontiers are…
This paper addresses the problem of mobile grasping in dynamic, unknown environments where a robot must operate under a limited field-of-view. The fundamental challenge is the inherent trade-off between ``seeing'' around to reduce…
The paper surveys topological problems relevant to the motion planning problem of robotics and includes some new results and constructions. First we analyse the notion of topological complexity of configuration spaces which is responsible…
This paper presents a provably correct method for robot navigation in 2D environments cluttered with familiar but unexpected non-convex, star-shaped obstacles as well as completely unknown, convex obstacles. We presuppose a limited range…
High speed navigation through unknown environments is a challenging problem in robotics. It requires fast computation and tight integration of all the subsystems on the robot such that the latency in the perception-action loop is as small…
Despite the performance advantages of modern sampling-based motion planners, solving high dimensional planning problems in near real-time remains a challenge. Applications include hyper-redundant manipulators, snake-like and humanoid…
3D geometric information is essential for manipulation tasks, as robots need to perceive the 3D environment, reason about spatial relationships, and interact with intricate spatial configurations. Recent research has increasingly focused on…
Using underwater robots instead of humans for the inspection of coastal piers can enhance efficiency while reducing risks. A key challenge in performing these tasks lies in achieving efficient and rapid path planning within complex…
A novel, adaptive ground-aware, and cost-effective 3D Object Detection pipeline is proposed. The ground surface representation introduced in this paper, in comparison to its uni-planar counterparts (methods that model the surface of a whole…