12 accepted papers
Landing safety is a challenge heavily engaging the research community recently, due to the increasing interest in applications availed by aerial vehicles. In this paper, we propose a landing safety pipeline based on state of the art object detectors and OctoMap. First, a point cloud of surface obsta…
Reliable and robust navigation of autonomous mobile robots in indoor environments faces significant challenges due to the absence of GPS, visual degradation, repetitive structures, illumination variations, and low texture. These factors adversely affect localization systems. Current robots often use…
The increasing demand for applications in competitive fields, such as assisted living and aerial robots, drives contemporary research into the development, implementation and integration of power-constrained solutions. Although, deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable performances in ma
Autonomous vehicle navigation in complex and unpredictable outdoor environments requires extensive and detailed understanding of the surrounding area and compliance with the traffic rules. In this paper, we attempt to imitate human driver behavior towards autonomous navigation that is suitable for d…
Hand pose estimation constitutes prime attainment for human-machine interaction-based applications. Real-time operation is vital in such tasks. Thus, a reliable estimator should exhibit low computational complexity and high precision at the same time. Previous works have explored the regression tech…
During the last decades, the research endeavours on autonomous driving found great resonance in Advanced Driver-Assistance Solutions that equipped the contemporary civilian vehicles and significantly boosted their driver-less mobility. The existing applications are mostly focused on urban scenarios…
A key feature in robotics applications is to recognize whether the current environment observation corresponds to a previously visited location. Should the place be recognized by the robot, a Loop Closure Detection (LCD) has occurred. The letter in hand deploys a novel low complexity LCD method base
Place recognition of pre-visited areas, widely known as Loop Closure Detection (LCD), constitutes one of the most important components in robotic applications, where the robot needs to estimate its pose while navigating through the field (e.g., simultaneous localization and mapping). In this paper,…
In the field of loop closure detection, the most conventional approach is based on the Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) image representation. Although well-established, this model rejects the spatial information regarding the local feature points' layout and performs the associations based only on their s…
In this paper we propose a novel technique for detecting loop closures on a trajectory by matching sequences of images instead of single instances. We build upon well established techniques for creating a bag of visual words with a tree structure and we introduce a significant novelty by extending t…
This paper presents a multi-robot system for autonomous vehicle extraction and transportation based on the “a-robot-for-a-wheel” concept. The developed prototype is able to extract vehicles from confined spaces with delicate handling, swiftly and in any direction. The novel lifting robots are capabl…
Space exploratory rovers do well in autonomous or composite semi-autonomous exploration of extraterrestrial surfaces, yet their localization relies on the particular spot they had landed, rather than being universal, i.e. based on the absolute coordinate system of the explored planet. The idea under…