20 accepted papers
Visual Odometry (VO) and Visual SLAM (VSLAM) systems often struggle in low-light and dark environments due to the lack of robust visual features. In this paper, we propose a novel active illumination framework to enhance the performance of VO and V-SLAM algorithms in these challenging conditions. Th
Handing over objects is an essential task in human-robot collaborative scenarios. Previous studies have predominantly employed rigid grippers to perform the handover, focusing on generating grasps that avoid physical contact with people. In this paper, we present a vision-based open-palm handover so
Visual active tracking is a growing research topic in robotics due to its key role in applications such as human assistance, disaster recovery, and surveillance. In contrast to passive tracking, active tracking approaches combine vision and control capabilities to detect and actively track the targe
In multi-robot systems, relative localization between platforms plays a crucial role in many tasks, such as leader following, target tracking, or cooperative maneuvering. State of the Art (SotA) approaches either rely on infrastructure-based or on infrastructure-less setups. The former typically ach
Autonomous robot navigation relies on the robot’s ability to understand its environment for localization, typically using a Visual Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) algorithm that processes image sequences. While state-of-the-art methods have shown remarkable performance, they still have…
In the last decade, data-driven approaches have become popular choices for quadrotor control, thanks to their ability to facilitate the adaptation to unknown or uncertain flight conditions. Among the different data-driven paradigms, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is currently one of the most expl…
Vision-based topological localization is recently emerging as a promising alternative to metric pose estimation techniques in robotic navigation systems. Contrarily to the latter, which suffer from a quick degradation of their performance under non-ideal conditions (e.g., scenes with poor illuminati
Gaussian Processes (GPs) are expressive models for capturing signal statistics and expressing prediction uncer-tainty. As a result, the robotics community has gathered interest in leveraging these methods for inference, planning, and control. Unfortunately, despite providing a closed-form inference…
Enabling Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) with semi-autonomous capabilities to assist their teleoperation is crucial in several applications. Remote human operators do not have, in general, the situational awareness to perceive obstacles near the drone, nor the readiness to provide commands to avoid col…
Autonomous exploration is a longstanding goal of the robotics community. Aerial drone navigation has proven to be especially challenging. The stringent requirements on cost, weight, maneuverability, and power consumption do not allow exploration approaches to easily be employed or adapted to differe
The development of visual tracking systems is becoming a major goal for the Robotics community. Most of the works dealing with this topic focus exclusively on passive tracking, where the target is confined within the camera’s field of view. Only a minority propose active approaches, capable not only
Autonomous robotic platforms can be effectively used to perform automatic fruits yield estimation. To this aim, robots need data-driven models that process image streams and count, even approximately, the number of fruits in an orchard. However, training such models following a supervised paradigm i
In this work, we address the problem of visual navigation by following instructions. In this task, the robot must interpret a natural language instruction in order to follow a predefined path in a possibly unknown environment. Despite different approaches have been proposed in the last years, they a
Fruit counting is a fundamental component for yield estimation applications. Most of the existing approaches address this problem by relying on fruit models (i.e., by using object detectors) or by explicitly learning to count. Despite the impressive results achieved by these approaches, all of them
Enabling effective human-robot interaction is crucial for any service robotics application. In this context, a fundamental aspect is the development of a user-friendly human-robot interface, such as a natural language interface. In this letter, we investigate the robot side of the interface, in part
In this letter, we propose an end-to-end deep architecture that jointly learns to detect obstacles and estimate their depth for MAV flight applications. Most of the existing approaches rely either on Visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) systems or on depth estimation models to build t
This work proposes a novel deep network architecture to solve the camera ego-motion estimation problem. A motion estimation network generally learns features similar to optical flow (OF) fields starting from sequences of images. This OF can be described by a lower dimensional latent space. Previous
Modern autonomous mobile robots require a strong understanding of their surroundings in order to safely operate in cluttered and dynamic environments. Monocular depth estimation offers a geometry-independent paradigm to detect free, navigable space with minimum space, and power consumption. These re
Visual ego-motion estimation, or briefly visual odometry (VO), is one of the key building blocks of modern SLAM systems. In the last decade, impressive results have been demonstrated in the context of visual navigation, reaching very high localization performance. However, all ego-motion estimation
Obstacle Detection is a central problem for any robotic system, and critical for autonomous systems that travel at high speeds in unpredictable environment. This is often achieved through scene depth estimation, by various means. When fast motion is considered, the detection range must be longer eno…