19 accepted papers
The ability to achieve and maintain inverted poses is essential for unlocking the full agility of miniature blimp robots (MBRs). However, developing reliable inverted control strategies for MBRs remains challenging due to their complex and underactuated dynamics. To address this challenge, we propos…
Robotic manipulation of deformable linear objects (DLOs) presents significant challenges due to complex dynamics and frequent self-occlusions. Existing robotic knot tying methods typically rely on precise topological state tracking with ordered keypoints and explicit edge connectivity. This reliance…
Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) encounter significant challenges in confined spaces like ports and testing tanks, where vehicle-environment interactions, such as wave reflections and unsteady flows, introduce complex, time-varying disturbances. Model-based state estimation methods can struggle
Image-goal navigation enables a robot to reach the location where a target image was captured, using visual cues for guidance. However, current methods either rely heavily on data and computationally expensive learning-based approaches or lack efficiency in complex environments due to insufficient e
Formation control is essential for swarm robotics, enabling coordinated behavior in complex environments. In this paper, we introduce a novel formation control system for an indoor blimp swarm using a specialized leader-follower approach enhanced with a dynamic leader-switching mechanism. This strat
Existing indoor SLAM datasets primarily focus on robot sensing, often lacking building architectures. To address this gap, we design and construct the first dataset to couple the SLAM and BIM, named SLABIM. This dataset provides BIM and SLAM -oriented sensor data, both modeling a university building
Real-time estimation and modeling of dynamic phenomena governed by partial differential equations play a key role in applications of environmental monitoring, disaster response, and industrial control. Accurately capturing the spatiotemporal dynamics of these processes is essential for rapid analysi
In this study, we present a novel simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system, VIMS, designed for underwater navigation. Conventional visual-inertial state estimators encounter significant practical challenges in perceptually degraded underwater environments, particularly in scale estimation
The significant differences in the physical properties of air and water pose a substantial challenge for the development of hybrid aerial-aquatic vehicle (HAAV), which leading to increased prototype size, heavier thrusters, and reduced efficiency or under-actuation in one of the mediums. This letter
Although soft manipulators are endowed with compliance and flexibility, most control strategies focus on end-effector control and lack shape control ability. This letter aims to design a shape controller for the soft manipulator. Firstly, we establish a modified forward kinematics model (FKM) based
Opinions of individuals in large groups evolve through interactions with neighbors and the environment, which can be modeled with opinion dynamics. In this paper, we propose a distributed opinion-based strategy for large-scale multi-robot task allocation utilizing the convergence behaviors of opinio…
<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Shared autonomy</i> functions as a flexible framework that empowers robots to operate across a spectrum of autonomy levels, allowing for efficient task execution with minimal human oversight. However, h
Distributed Data Fusion (DDF), as a prevalent technique that empowers scalable, flexible, and robust information fusing, has been employed in various multi-sensor networks operating in uncertain and dynamic environments. This paper proposes a cognition difference-based mechanism to construct a dynam…
This paper introduces a game-theoretical approach to the multi-robot task allocation problem, where each robot is considered as self-interested and cannot share its personal utility functions. We consider the case where each robot can execute multiple tasks and each task requires only one robot. For…
Effective task allocation is an essential component to the coordination of heterogeneous robots. This paper proposes a hybrid task allocation algorithm that improves upon given initial solutions, for example from the popular decentralized market-based allocation algorithm, via a derivative-free opti…
We propose a memory-constrained partition-based method to extract symbolic representations of the belief state and its dynamics in order to solve planning problems in a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). Our K-means partitioning strategy uses a fixed number of symbols to represent…
This paper proposes a distributed field mapping algorithm that drives a team of robots to explore and learn an unknown scalar field. The algorithm is based on a bio-inspired approach known as Speeding-Up and Slowing-Down (SUSD) for distributed source seeking problems. Our algorithm leverages a Gauss…
This paper considers a group of mobile sensing agents in a flow field and presents a distributed method for motion tomography (MT) that estimates the underlying flow field. MT formulates an underdetermined nonlinear system of equations as an inverse problem. Inspired by the Kaczmarz method which is…
We present an approach that allows the Georgia Tech Miniature Autonomous Blimp (GT-MAB) to detect and follow a human. This accomplishment is the first Human Robot Interaction (HRI) demonstration between an uninstrumented human and a robotic blimp. GT-MAB is an ideal platform for HRI missions because…