15 accepted papers
This work investigates the use of multiple Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs) as Communication/Navigation Aids (CNAs) to enhance the navigation and state estimation of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). Our approach builds on recent advancements in low-cost sensors and platforms, which enable n
Traversability prediction is a critical component of autonomous navigation in unstructured environments, where complex and uncertain robot-terrain interactions pose significant challenges such as traction loss and dynamic instability. Despite recent progress in learning-based traversability predicti
The rise of lightweight, low-cost underwater vehicle-manipulator systems (UVMS) has made autonomous underwater manipulation increasingly accessible. Yet, most current research remains limited to isolated tasks, such as trajectory tracking or compensation of unknown payloads. Detailed experimental an
Environmental monitoring via UAVs offers unprecedented aerial observation capabilities. However, the limited flight durations of typical multirotors and the demands on human attention in outdoor missions call for more autonomous solutions. Addressing the specific challenges of precise UAV landings –…
Time-effective and accurate source localization with mobile robots is crucial in safety-critical scenarios, e.g. leakage detection. This becomes particular challenging in realistic cluttered scenarios, i.e. in the presence of complex current flows or wind. Traditional methods often fall short due to…
Accurate localization systems are still a bottleneck for Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs). In recent years, fiducial markers have become a readily available, low-cost option. However, an in-depth analysis of marker detection accuracy in the underwater domain has yet to be performed. We propose a…
Confined and cluttered aquatic environments present a number of significant challenges with respect to inspection by robotic platforms, including localisation and communications. Some of these can be mitigated by using collaborative heterogeneous multi-robot teams. An important element of such a sys…
Exploration and monitoring of hazardous environments, such as legacy nuclear storage ponds, constitute safety-critical missions to be performed by small-scale underwater robots. These monitoring tasks require fully actuated robot platforms in order to allow for hovering while inspecting objects of i…
Considering realistic characteristics of acoustic localization methods is crucial for roboticists when developing guidance and control algorithms for small and agile underwater robots. Current simulators either rely purely on geometric distancing, i.e. do not consider dynamic effects such as robot m…
Exploration and monitoring of hazardous fields in marine environments is one of the most promising tasks to be performed by fleets of low-cost micro autonomous underwater vehicles (μAUVs). In contrast to vehicles in other domains, underwater robots are forced to perform all computations onboard as n…
Aerobatic quadrotors have been a very active field of research for the last two decades. Their huge community boosted the development of computational light-weight planning and control algorithms. In contrast and despite recent progress, research on agile micro autonomous underwater vehicles (µAUV)…
Despite the recent progress, guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) are largely unsolved for agile micro autonomous underwater vehicles (μAUVs). Hereby, robust and accurate self-localization systems which fit μAUVs play a key role and their absence constitutes a severe bottleneck in micro underwate…
Navigation and control are a largely unsolved problems for micro autonomous underwater vehicles (μAUVs). The main challenges are due to the lack of accurate underwater localization systems, which fit on-board of μAUVs. In this work, we present an integrated navigation and control architecture consis…
Micro autonomous underwater vehicles (μAUVs) allow early-stage experimental testing even in small tanks. In contrast to large facilities, these tanks are usually not equipped with high-fidelity motion capture systems due to high cost and reduced required accuracy for proof-of-concept testing.In this…
We present the new HippoCampus micro underwater vehicle, first introduced in [1]. It is designed for monitoring confined fluid volumes. These tightly constrained settings demand agile vehicle dynamics. Moreover, we adapt a robust attitude control scheme for aerial drones to the underwater domain. We…