36 accepted papers
In this paper, we study adaptive locomotion for inchworm-like robots that move using friction-based pads inspired by snake scales. The robot moves by alternating extension and contraction phases, which require enough friction at the rear and front pads. Locomotion speed depends on how far the body e…
Sustaining the gait locomotion in an adversarial environment requires the robot to react to novel experiences adaptively. In Free Energy Principle (FEP), the behavioral reaction is driven by the discrepancy between observation and prediction. Although, for legged robot gait locomotion, the predictio
In this paper, we address the sensitivity of the 3D LiDAR-based localization to environmental structural ambiguity. Although existing approaches employ additional sensors, such as cameras and inertial measurement units, to account for such ambiguities, multi-sensor localization is still an open prob…
Mobile robots operating in convoys have a limited view of the terrain to be traversed if it is occluded by the preceding vehicle. Furthermore, the preceding vehicle might change the terrain geometry and eventually significantly alter its traversability by driving over the terrain. When the following…
In this paper, we focus on improving planning efficiency for ground vehicles in navigation and exploration tasks where the environment is unknown or partially known, leading to frequent updates of the navigational goal as new sensory information is acquired. Asymptotically optimal motion planners li…
In the paper, we address wireless communication infrastructure building by relay placement based on approaches utilized in wireless network sensors. The problem is motivated by search and inspection missions with mobile robots, where known sensing ranges may be exploited. We investigate the relay pl…
In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic gait controller for the repetitive behavior of soft robot manipulators performing routine tasks. Compliance with soft robots is advantageous when the robot interacts with living organisms and other fragile objects. However, predicting and controlling repetit…
In this letter, we address path planning for the quasi-static locomotion of a multi-legged walking robot on terrains with limited available footholds, such as passing a water stream over rocks. The task is to find a feasible sequence of steps to navigate the robot in environments where precise foot
Repeated exploration of a water surface to detect objects of interest and their subsequent monitoring is important in search-and-rescue or ocean clean-up operations. Since the location of any detected object is dynamic, we propose to address the combined surface exploration and monitoring of the det
An in-flight loss of thrust poses a risk to the aircraft, its passengers, and people on the ground. When a loss of thrust happens, the (auto)pilot is forced to perform an emergency landing, possibly toward one of the reachable airports. If none of the airports is reachable, the aircraft is forced to…
Personal air transportation on short distances, so-called Urban Air Mobility (UAM), is a trend in modern aviation that raises new challenges as flying in urban areas at low altitudes induces an additional risk to people and properties on the ground. Risk-aware trajectory planning can mitigate the ri…
We consider the problem of finding collision-free paths for curvature-constrained systems in the presence of obstacles while minimizing execution time. Specifically, we focus on the setting where a planar system can travel at some range of speeds with unbounded acceleration. This setting can model m
This letter concerns optimal power transmission line inspection formulated as a proposed generalization of the traveling salesman problem for a multi-route one-depot scenario. The problem is formulated for an inspection vehicle with a limited travel budget. Therefore, the solution can be composed of
This paper presents a novel approach to the multigoal trajectory planning for vehicles with curvature-constrained trajectories such as fixed-wing aircraft. In the existing formulation called the Dubins Traveling Salesman Problem (DTSP), the vehicle speed is assumed to be constant over the whole traj…
Multi-goal curvature-constrained planning such as the Dubins Traveling Salesman Problem (DTSP) combines NP-hard combinatorial routing with continuous optimization to determine the optimal vehicle heading angle for each target location. The problem can be addressed as combinatorial routing using a fi…
In this paper, we address the problem of finding cost-efficient three-dimensional paths that satisfy the maximum allowed curvature and the pitch angle of the vehicle. For any given initial and final configurations, the problem is decoupled into finding the horizontal and vertical parts of the path s…
Models of human behaviour, such as pedestrian flows, are beneficial for safe and efficient operation of mobile robots. We present a new methodology for benchmarking of pedestrian flow models based on the afforded safety of robot navigation in human-populated environments. While previous evaluations…
In this letter, we address the multi-goal path planning problem to determine a cost-efficient path to visit a set of three-dimensional regions. The problem is a variant of the traveling salesman problem with neighborhoods (TSPN) where an individual neighborhood consists of multiple regions, and the
This paper introduces the Close Enough Orienteering Problem (CEOP) for planning missions with multi-rotor aerial vehicles considering their maximal velocity and acceleration limits. The addressed problem stands to select the most rewarding target locations and sequence to visit them in the given lim…
In this paper, we address motion efficiency in autonomous robot exploration with multi-legged walking robots that can traverse rough terrains at the cost of lower efficiency and greater body vibration. We propose a robotic system for online and incremental learning of the terrain traversal cost that…
This letter concerns a variant of the orienteering problem (OP) that arises from multi-goal data collection scenarios where a robot with a limited travel budget is requested to visit given target locations in an environment with obstacles. We call the introduced OP variant the physical OP (POP). The
Loss of thrust is a critical situation for human pilots of fixed-wing aircraft which force them to select a landing site in the nearby range and perform an emergency landing. The time for the landing site selection is limited by the actual altitude of the aircraft, and it may be fatal if the correct…
The effectiveness of the robot locomotion can be measured using the cost of transport (CoT) which represents the amount of energy that is needed for traversing from one place to another. Terrains excerpt different mechanical properties when crawled by a multi-legged robot, and thus different values…
Proprioceptive terrain sensing is essential for rough terrain traversal because it helps legged robots to negotiate individual steps by reacting to terrain irregularities. In this work, we propose to utilize inertial data in the detection of the contact between the leg and the terrain during the str…
The problem addressed in this paper is motivated by surveillance mission planning with curvature-constrained trajectories for Dubins vehicles that can be formulated as the Dubins Traveling Salesman Problem with Neighborhoods (DTSPN). We aim to provide a tight lower bound of the DTSPN, especially for…
This letter concerns surveillance planning for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that is requested to periodically take snapshots of areas of interest by visiting a given set of waypoint locations in the shortest time possible. The studied problem can be considered as a variant of the combinatorial t
We introduce an extension of the Dubins Traveling Salesman Problem with Neighborhoods into the 3D space in which a fixed-wing aerial vehicle is requested to visit a set of target regions while the vehicle motion constraints are satisfied, i.e., the minimum turning radius and maximum climb and dive a…
In this letter, we address the orienteering problem (OP) for curvature constrained vehicle. For a given set of target locations, each with associated reward, the OP stands to find a tour from a prescribed starting location to a given ending location such that it maximizes collected rewards while the
In this work, we concern the problem of motion planning for a hexapod walking robot crawling in a semi-structured environment where a precise foot-tip positioning is necessary. We propose pipelined approach utilizing an RGB-D camera to perceive and map the forthcoming terrain in 2.5 D which is then…
In this paper, we address a generalization of the Orienteering Problem (OP) for curvature-constrained vehicles and to problems where it is allowed to collect a reward associated to each target location within a specified distance from the target. The addressed problem combines challenges of the comb…
This paper concerns a problem of the latency reduction in the vision-based mobile robot navigation, which is considered as the crucial system property to determine a control command based on visual data in practical deployments of mobile robots. The problem is addressed by a processor centric FPGA-b
We propose a self-organising map (SOM) algorithm as a solution to a new multi-goal path planning problem for active perception and data collection tasks. We optimise paths for a multi-robot team that aims to maximally observe a set of nodes in the environment. The selected nodes are observed by visi…
In this paper, we consider existing asymptotically optimal inspection planning algorithm in coverage path planning with realistic visibility constraints of standard cameras. Although the existing approach is able to provide an optimal solution with omnidirectional sensing and limited sensing range,
In this paper, we consider road following to autonomously navigate a mobile robot through an environment while keeping the robot on the specified road. Contrary to existing approaches based on a forward looking camera, we consider the problem for a technically blind walking robot without any exteroc
This paper concerns the self-localization problem of a hexapod walking robot operating in rough terrains. Given that legged robots exhibit higher terrain passability than wheeled or tracked platforms when operating in harsh environments, they constitute a challenge for the localization techniques be…
In this paper, we address the problem of optimal path planning to visit a set of regions by Dubins vehicle, which is also known as the Dubins Traveling Salesman Problem with Neighborhoods (DTSPN). This problem can be tackled by a transformation to other variants of the TSP or evolutionary algorithms…