13 accepted papers
We investigated the performance of existing semiand fully autonomous methods for controlling flipper-based skid-steer robots. Our study involves the reimplementation of these methods for a fair comparison, and it introduces a novel semi-autonomous control policy that provides a compelling trade-off
While autonomous navigation of mobile robots on rigid terrain is a well-explored problem, navigating on deformable terrain such as tall grass or bushes remains a challenge. To address it, we introduce an explainable, physics-aware and end-to-end differentiable model which predicts the outcome of rob…
Depth perception is considered an invaluable source of information in the context of 3D mapping and various robotics applications. However, point cloud maps acquired using consumer-level <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">light detection
Deep perception models have to reliably cope with an open-world setting of domain shifts induced by different geographic regions, sensor properties, mounting positions, and several other reasons. Since covering all domains with annotated data is technically intractable due to the endless possible va…
Automatic pseudo-labeling is a powerful tool to tap into large amounts of sequential unlabeled data. It is especially appealing in safety-critical applications of autonomous driving, where performance requirements are extreme, datasets are large, and manual labeling is very challenging. We propose t
We demonstrate a hybrid approach to autonomous flipper control, focusing on a fusion of hard-coded and learned knowledge. The result is a sample-efficient and modifiable control structure that can be used in conjunction with a mapping/navigation stack. The backbone of the control policy is formulate
We consider the task of active exploration of large subterranean environments with a ground mobile robot. Our goal is to autonomously explore a large unknown area and to obtain an accurate coverage and localization of objects of interest (artifacts). The exploration is constrained by the restricted
We address the problem of self-supervised learning for predicting the shape of supporting terrain (i.e. the terrain which will provide rigid support for the robot during its traversal) from sparse input measurements. The learning method exploits two types of ground-truth labels: dense 2.5D maps and
This letter presents a complete pipeline for learning continuous motion control policies for a mobile robot when only a nondifferentiable physics simulator of robot–terrain interactions is available. The multimodal state estimation of the robot is also complex and difficult to simulate, so we simult
This paper presents a novel technique that allows for both computationally fast and sufficiently plausible simulation of vehicles with non-deformable tracks. The method is based on an effect we have called Contact Surface Motion. A comparison with several other methods for simulation of tracked vehi…
We propose an active 3D mapping method for depth sensors, which allow individual control of depth-measuring rays, such as the newly emerging Solid State Lidars. The method simultaneously (i) learns to reconstruct a dense 3D voxel-map from sparse depth measurements, and (ii) optimizes the reactive co…
Policy Gradient methods require many real-world trials. Some of the trials may endanger the robot system and cause its rapid wear. Therefore, a safe or at least gentle-to-wear exploration is a desired property. We incorporate bounds on the probability of unwanted trials into the recent Contextual Re…
Controlling mobile robots with complex articulated parts and hence many degrees of freedom generates high cognitive load on the operator, especially under demanding conditions such as in Urban Search & Rescue missions. We propose a solution based on reinforcement learning in order to accommodate the…