10 accepted papers
Planning under partial observability is both challenging and critical for reliable robot operation. The past decade has seen substantial advances in this domain: The mathematically principled approach for addressing such problems, namely the Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), has…
The concept of continuous-time trajectory representation has brought increased accuracy and efficiency to multi-modal sensor fusion in modern SLAM. However, regardless of these advantages, its offline property caused by the requirement of global batch optimization is critically hindering its relevan…
In this paper we present the design and control strategies of a novel quadruped climbing robot (named Magneto) with three degrees of freedom (3-DOF) actuated limbs and a 3-DOF compliant magnetic foot. By exploiting its high degrees of freedom, Magneto is able to deform its body shape to squeeze thro…
This work presents a method to improve vehicle localization by using the information from a prior occupancy grid to bound the possible poses. The method, named Map-Aware Particle Filter, uses a nonlinear approach to map-matching that can be integrated into a particle filter framework for localizatio…
The ability to drive autonomously in heterogeneous environments without GPS, pattern identification (e.g. road following), or artificial landmarks is key to field robotics. To address this challenge, we present a complete waypoint navigation framework for unmanned ground vehicles. A Velodyne PUCK VL…
To address the goal of locomotion in very complex and difficult terrains, the authors are developing a new class of Ultralight Legged Robots. This paper presents the Multilegged Autonomous eXplorer (MAX), an ultralight, six-legged robot for traversal and exploration of challenging indoor and outdoor…
Jumping is an effective navigation mode for micro-robots. Recent research has addressed significant challenges that exist in developing reliable, energy efficient, light weight micro actuation mechanisms, mostly focused on a single jump. However, there has been limited exploration of planning strate
In this paper we propose a new vision-based obstacle avoidance strategy using the Underwater Dark Channel Prior (UDCP) that can be applied to any Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) equipped with a simple monocular camera and minimal on-board processing capabilities. For each incoming image, our metho…
Underwater environments present a considerable challenge for computer vision, since water is a scattering medium with substantial light absorption characteristics which is made even more severe by turbidity. This poses significant problems for visual underwater navigation, object detection, tracking…
Legged robots offer the potential of locomotion across various types of terrains. Different terrains require different gait patterns to enable greater traversal efficiency. Consequently, as a legged robot transitions from one type of terrain to another, the gait pattern should be adapted so as to ma…