15 accepted papers
Coordinated multi-robot navigation is an essential ability for a team of robots operating in diverse environments. Robot teams often need to maintain specific formations, such as wedge formations, to enhance visibility, positioning, and efficiency during fast movement. However, complex environments
Autonomous ground robots navigating unstructured off-road environments face perceptual challenges, such as sensor obscuration or failure, which can lead to inaccurate perception or navigation failures. While robot adaptation has recently gained increasing attention, self-reflective robot adaptation,
Multiple robots can effectively acquire information from an environment and transmit it to a static base station. However, communication may not be possible everywhere in the environment, so robots must coordinate when and where to rendezvous with disconnected teammates. Such coordination presents c
Estimating terrain traversability in off-road environments requires reasoning about complex interaction dynamics between the robot and these terrains. However, it is challenging to create informative labels to learn a model in a supervised manner for these interactions. We propose a method that lear…
Using robots to collect data is an effective way to obtain information from the environment and communicate it to a static base station. Furthermore, robots have the capability to communicate with one another, potentially decreasing the time for data to reach the base station. We present a Mixed Int…
This paper presents a method for robust optimization for online incremental Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Due to the NP-Hardness of data association in the presence of perceptual aliasing, tractable (approximate) approaches to data association will produce erroneous measurements. We…
When robots operate in real-world off-road environments with unstructured terrains, the ability to adapt their navigational policy is critical for effective and safe navigation. However, off-road terrains introduce several challenges to robot navigation, including dynamic obstacles and terrain uncer…
We present a self-supervised approach for learning to predict traversable paths for wheeled mobile robots that require good traction to navigate. Our algorithm, termed WayFAST (Waypoint Free Autonomous Systems for Traversability), uses RGB and depth data, along with navigation experience, to autonom
Exploring robots may fail due to environmental hazards. Thus, robots need to account for the possibility of failure to plan the best exploration paths. Optimizing expected utility enables robots to find plans that balance achievable reward with the inherent risks of exploration. Moreover, when robot…
In many exploration scenarios, it is important for robots to efficiently explore new areas and constantly communicate results. Mobile robots inherently couple motion and network topology due to the effects of position on wireless propagation-e.g. distance or obstacles between network nodes. Informat
This paper presents an approach and introduces new open-source tools that can be used to evaluate robotic mapping algorithms. Also described is an extensive subterranean mine rescue dataset based upon the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) challenge including professionally surveyed ground truth. Finally, so…
Research in autonomous driving has benefited from a number of visual datasets collected from mobile platforms, leading to improved visual perception, greater scene understanding, and ultimately higher intelligence. However, this set of existing data collectively represents only highly structured, ur…
When working alongside human collaborators in dynamic environments such as a disaster recovery, an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) may require fast field adaptation to perform its duties or learn novel tasks. In disaster recovery situations, personnel and equipment are constrained, so training must be…
Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are cost- and time-efficient systems for environmental sampling. Informative adaptive sampling has been shown to be an effective method of sampling a lake or ocean for environmental modeling. In this paper, we focus on multi-robot coordination for informative ad…
Multi-concept visual classification is emerging as a common environment perception technique, with applications in autonomous mobile robot navigation. Supervised visual classifiers are typically trained with large sets of images, hand annotated by humans with region boundary outlines followed by lab…