12 accepted papers
Range-based SLAM is a well-established technique for estimating the pose of a mobile robot operating in an unknown environment. Current state-of-the-art solutions use occupancy-grid maps to represent the world. While fast and accurate, their performance is limited by two facts. First, in an occupanc
Recovering the 3D structure of the surrounding environment is an essential task in any vision-controlled Structure-from-Motion (SfM) scheme. This paper focuses on the theoretical properties of the SfM, known as the incremental active depth estimation. The term incremental stands for estimating the 3…
In this paper, we propose a mapping technique that builds a continuous representation of the environment from range data. The strategy presented here encodes the probability of points in space to be occupied using 2.5D B-spline surfaces. For a fast update rate, the surface is recursively updated as…
The 3D depth estimation and relative pose estimation problem within a decentralized architecture is a challenging problem that arises in missions that require coordination among multiple vision-controlled robots. The depth estimation problem aims at recovering the 3D information of the environment.…
This letter addresses the moving path following (MPF) motion control problem that consists of steering a robotic vehicle along a specified geometric path expressed with respect to a moving target frame. External disturbances that depend on the operational environment such as maritime currents, wind,
This paper presents a 2D B-spline mapping framework for representing unstructured environments in a compact manner. While occupancy-grid and landmark-based maps have been successfully employed by the robotics community in indoor scenarios, outdoor long-term autonomous operations require a more compa…
In this letter, a novel approach to the cooperative path following (CPF) control problem is proposed that aims to reduce the frequency of communication between the robotic vehicles while achieving cooperation. Specifically, a decentralized, event-based cooperative controller is designed to achieve c
This paper addresses the source localization problem of an acoustic fish-tag using the Time-of-Arrival measurement of an acoustic signal, transmitted by the fish-tag. The Time-of-Arrival measurements denote the pseudo-range information between the acoustic receiver and the fish-tag, except that the…
This letter proposes a low-level visual navigation algorithm to improve visual localization of a mobile robot. The algorithm, based on artificial potential fields, associates each feature in the current image frame with an attractive or neutral potential energy, with the objective of generating a co
Moving Path Following (MPF) control laws allows an autonomous vehicle to converge to and follow a path that is moving with respect to an inertial frame. This paper formally extends the MPF methods present in the literature to the case of three dimensional paths that can be moving with time-varying l…
The large number of potential applications for robotic odor source localization has motivated the development of a variety of plume tracking algorithms, the majority of which work in restricted two-dimensional scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a distributed algorithm for 3-D plume tracking usin…
Robotic odor source localization is a promising tool with numerous applications in safety, search and rescue, and environmental science. In this paper, we present an algorithm for odor source localization using multiple cooperating robots equipped with chemical sensors. Laplacian feedback is employe…