7 accepted papers
Long-term state estimation over graphs remains challenging as current graph estimation methods scale poorly on large, long-term graphs. To address this, our work advances a current state-of-the-art graph sparsification algorithm, maximizing algebraic connectivity (MAC). MAC is a sparsification metho…
Robotic perception often requires solving large nonlinear least-squares (NLS) problems. While sparsity has been well-exploited to scale solvers, a complementary and underexploited structure is emph{separability} -- where some variables (e.g., visual landmarks) enter the residuals linearly and, for a…
Reliable simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms are necessary for safety-critical autonomous navigation. In the communication-constrained multi-agent setting, navigation systems increasingly use point-to-point range sensors as they afford measurements with low bandwidth requirements
A key open challenge in off-road autonomy is that the traversability of terrain often depends on the vehicle's state. In particular, some obstacles are only traversable from some orientations. However, learning this interaction by encoding the angle of approach as a model input demands a large and d…
We present a novel initialization technique for the range-aided simultaneous localization and mapping (RA-SLAM) problem. In RA-SLAM we consider measurements of point-to-point distances in addition to measurements of rigid transformations to landmark or pose variables. Standard formulations of RA-SLA…
We present nested sampling for factor graphs (NSFG), a novel nested sampling approach to approximate inference for posterior distributions expressed over factor-graphs. Performing such inference is a key step in simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Although the Gaussian approximation often
We present a novel path-planning algorithm to reduce localization error for a network of robots cooperatively localizing via inter-robot range measurements. The quality of localization with range measurements depends on the configuration of the network, and poor configurations can cause substantial…