36 accepted papers
Decentralized Collaborative Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (C-SLAM) techniques often struggle to identify map overlaps due to significant viewpoint variations among robots. Motivated by recent advancements in 3D foundation models, which can register images despite large viewpoint differences,…
Recent studies demonstrate the potential of blockchain to enable robots in a swarm to achieve secure consensus about the environment, particularly when robots are homogeneous and perform identical tasks. Typically, robots receive rewards for their contributions to consensus achievement, but no studi…
Decentralized collaborative simultaneous localization and mapping (C-SLAM) is essential to enable multirobot missions in unknown environments without relying on preexisting localization and communication infrastructure. This technology is anticipated to play a key role in the exploration of the Moon…
Robotic manipulators hold significant untapped potential for manufacturing industries, particularly when deployed in multi-robot configurations that can enhance resource utilization, increase throughput, and reduce costs. However, industrial manipulators typically operate in isolated one-robot, one-
Robotic manipulators hold significant untapped potential for manufacturing industries, particularly when deployed in multi-robot configurations that can enhance resource utilization, increase throughput, and reduce costs. However, industrial manipulators typically operate in isolated one-robot, one-…
Decentralized Collaborative Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (C-SLAM) techniques often struggle to identify map overlaps due to significant viewpoint variations among robots. Motivated by recent advancements in 3D foundation models, which can register images despite large viewpoint differences,
We propose a distributed multi-robot exploration planning method designed for complex, unconstrained environments featuring steep elevation changes. The method employs a two-tiered approach: a local exploration planner that constructs a grid graph to maximize exploration gain and a global planner th
In industrial environments, predicting human actions is essential for ensuring safe and effective collaboration between humans and robots. This paper introduces a perception framework that enables mobile robots to understand and share information about human actions in a decentralized way. The frame
Safe landing is essential in robotics applications, from industrial settings to space exploration. As artificial intelligence advances, we have developed PEACE (Prompt Engineering Automation for CLIPSeg Enhancement), a system that automatically generates and refines prompts for identifying landing z
Exploration in unknown and unstructured environments is a pivotal requirement for robotic applications. A robot’s exploration behavior can be inherently affected by the performance of its Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) subsystem, although SLAM and exploration are generally studied sepa
Collaborative Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (C-SLAM) is a vital component for successful multi-robot operations in environments without an external positioning system, such as indoors, underground or underwater. In this paper, we introduce Swarm-SLAM, an open-source C-SLAM system that is des
The topology of a robotic swarm affects the convergence speed of consensus and the mobility of the robots. In this paper, we prove the existence of a complete set of local topology manipulation operations that allow the transformation of a swarm topology. The set is complete in the sense that any ot…
This letter presents a novel solution for UAV control in cooperative multi-robot systems, which can be used in various scenarios such as leader-following, landing on a moving base, or specific relative motion with a target. Unlike classical methods that tackle UAV control in the world frame, we dire
We propose a novel real-time LiDAR intensity image-based simultaneous localization and mapping method, which addresses the geometry degeneracy problem in un-structured environments. Traditional LiDAR-based front-end odometry mostly relies on geometric features such as points, lines and planes. A lac…
Visual place recognition techniques based on deep learning, which have imposed themselves as the state-of-the-art in recent years, do not generalize well to environments visually different from the training set. Thus, to achieve top performance, it is sometimes necessary to fine-tune the networks to
Communication is an important capability for multi-robot exploration because (1) inter-robot communication (comms) improves coverage efficiency and (2) robot-to-base comms improves situational awareness. Exploring comms-restricted (e.g., subterranean) environments requires a multi-robot system to to
Exploration of unknown environments is an important challenge in the field of robotics. While a single robot can achieve this task alone, evidence suggests it could be accomplished more efficiently by groups of robots, with advantages in terms of terrain coverage as well as robustness to failures. E…
We propose a novel formulation to use plane primitives in the direct sparse odometry formulation. Unlike existing SLAM works that introduce geometric error terms to account for planes, our method keeps the full error as purely photometric. The proposed system exploits the segmentation masks and plan
Flying robots are usually rather delicate and require protective enclosures when facing the risk of collision, while high complexity and reduced payload are recurrent problems with collision-resilient flying robots. Inspired by arthropods' exoskeletons, we design a simple, open source, easily manufa…
Connectivity maintenance is crucial for the real world deployment of multi-robot systems, as it ultimately allows the robots to communicate, coordinate and perform tasks in a collaborative way. A connectivity maintenance controller must keep the multi-robot system connected independently from the sy…
Humans and animals have learned or evolved to use magnetic fields for navigation. Knowing how to model and estimate these fields can be used for motion planning. However, computing the propagation of electromagnetic fields in a given environment requires solving complex differential equations with a
Action and observation delays commonly occur in many Reinforcement Learning applications, such as remote control scenarios. We study the anatomy of randomly delayed environments, and show that partially resampling trajectory fragments in hindsight allows for off-policy multi-step value estimation. W…
Accurate localization and tracking are a fundamental requirement for robotic applications. Localization systems like GPS, optical tracking, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) are used for daily life activities, research, and commercial applications. Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology provides…
Privacy is an important facet of defence against adversaries. In this letter, we introduce the problem of private flocking. We consider a team of mobile robots flocking in the presence of an adversary, who is able to observe all robots' trajectories, and who is interested in identifying the leader.
Using multiple robots for exploring and mapping environments can provide improved robustness and performance, but it can be difficult to implement. In particular, limited communication bandwidth is a considerable constraint when a robot needs to determine if it has visited a location that was previo…
Robust pose graph optimization is essential for reliable pose estimation in Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system. Due to the nature of loop closures, even one spurious measurement could trick the SLAM estimator and severely distort the mapping results. Existing methods to avoid this p
To achieve collaborative tasks, robots in a team need to have a shared understanding of the environment and their location within it. Distributed Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) offers a practical solution to localize the robots without relying on an external positioning system (e.g. GP
One of the key factors for extended autonomy and resilience of multi-robot systems, especially when robots operate on batteries, is their ability to maintain energy sufficiency by recharging when needed. In situations with limited access to charging facilities, robots need to be able to share and co…
The coordination of robot swarms - large decentralized teams of robots - generally relies on robust and efficient inter-robot communication. Maintaining communication between robots is particularly challenging in field deployments where robot motion, unstructured environments, limited computational
Small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have generally little capacity to carry payloads. Through collaboration, the UAVs can increase their joint payload capacity and carry more significant loads. For maximum flexibility to dynamic and unstructured environments and task demands, we propose a fully de…
Perceptual aliasing is one of the main causes of the failure for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) systems operating in the wild. Perceptual aliasing is a phenomenon where different places generate a similar visual (or, in general, perceptual) footprint. This causes spurious measurements
Robot swarms herald the ability to solve complex tasks using a large collection of simple devices. However, engineering a robotic swarm is far from trivial, with a major hurdle being the definition of the control laws leading to the desired globally coordinated behavior. Communication is a key eleme…
In this paper, we demonstrate how behavioural structure, such as a finite state machine, can emerge in minimal robots without computation nor memory capabilities. As a case study we observe the ability of a group of non-holonomic robots to form robust, self-healing circle formations in a decentraliz…
We present a decentralized and scalable approach for deployment of a robot swarm. Our approach tackles scenarios in which the swarm must reach multiple spatially distributed targets, and enforce the constraint that the robot network cannot be split. The basic idea behind our work is to construct a l…
Swarm robotics carries the potential of solving complex tasks using simple devices. To do so, however, one must define distributed control algorithms capable of producing globally coordinated behaviours. We propose a methodology to address the problem of the spatial coverage of multiple tasks with a…
We present Buzz, a novel programming language for heterogeneous robot swarms. Buzz advocates a compositional approach, offering primitives to define swarm behaviors both from the perspective of the single robot and of the overall swarm. Single-robot primitives include robot-specific instructions and…