28 accepted papers
The dynamic and heterogeneous nature of agricultural fields presents significant challenges for object detection and localization, particularly for autonomous mobile robots that are tasked with surveying previously unseen unstructured environments. Concurrently, there is a growing need for real-time…
Preference-based reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising approach for aligning policies with human intent but is often constrained by the high cost of human feedback. In this work, we introduce ROVED, a framework that integrates Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with selective human feedback to s…
Accurate LiDAR-camera calibration is the foundation of accurate multimodal fusion environmental perception for autonomous driving and robotic systems. Traditional calibration methods require extensive data collection in controlled environments and cannot compensate for the transformation changes dur…
The paper presents a method to stabilize dynamic gait for a legged robot with embodied compliance. Our approach introduces a unified description for rigid and compliant bodies to approximate their deformation and a formulation for deformable multibody systems. We develop the centroidal composite pre
This paper addresses the challenge of developing a multi-arm quadrupedal robot capable of efficiently harvesting fruit in complex, natural environments. To overcome the inherent limitations of traditional bimanual manipulation, we introduce the first three-arm quadrupedal robot LocoHarv3, that build
Reconstructing 3D scenes from a single image is a fundamentally ill-posed task due to the severely under-constrained nature of the problem. Consequently, when the scene is rendered from novel camera views, particularly in unseen regions far away from the input camera, existing single image to 3D rec…
This paper introduces a new wheel-legged robot and develops motion controllers based on central pattern generators (CPGs) for the robot to navigate over a range of terrains. A transformable leg-wheel design is considered and characterized in terms of key locomotion characteristics as a function of t…
By-tree information gathering is an essential task in precision agriculture achieved by ground mobile sensors, but it can be time- and labor-intensive. In this paper we present an algorithmic framework to perform real-time and on-the-go detection of trees and key geometric characteristics (namely, w…
This paper introduces a way to systematically investigate the effect of compliant prismatic spines in quadrupedal robot locomotion. We develop a novel spring-loaded lockable spine module, together with a new Spinal Compliance-Integrated Quadruped (SCIQ) platform for both empirical and numerical rese…
Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) often face a high risk of collision during autonomous flight, particularly in cluttered and unstructured environments. To mitigate the collision impact on sensitive onboard devices, resilient MAVs with mechanical protective cages and reinforced frames are commonly used.…
This paper proposes a method to evaluate the capability of aggressive legged robot landing under significant touchdown linear and angular velocities upon impact. Our approach builds upon the Planar Inverted Pendulum with Flywheel (PIPF) model and introduces a landing framework for the first stance s…
Soft robotics hold promise in the development of safe yet powered assistive wearable devices for infants. Key to this is the development of closed-loop controllers that can help regulate pneumatic pressure in the device's actuators in an effort to induce controlled motion at the user's limbs and be…
Scene understanding using multi-modal data is necessary in many applications, e.g., autonomous navigation. To achieve this in a variety of situations, existing models must be able to adapt to shifting data distributions without arduous data annotation. Current approaches assume that the source data…
Koopman operator theory has been gaining momentum for model extraction, planning, and control of data-driven robotic systems. The Koopman operator’s ability to extract dynamics from data depends heavily on the selection of an appropriate dictionary of lifting functions. In this letter, we propose AC
Contemporary robots in precision agriculture focus primarily on automated harvesting or remote sensing to monitor crop health. Comparatively less work has been performed with respect to collecting physical leaf samples in the field and retaining them for further analysis. Typically, orchard growers…
The paper focuses on collision-inclusive motion planning for impact-resilient mobile robots. We propose a new deformation recovery and replanning strategy to handle collisions that may occur at run-time. Contrary to collision avoidance methods that generate trajectories only in conservative local sp…
Koopman operator theory has served as the basis to extract dynamics for nonlinear system modeling and control across settings, including non-holonomic mobile robot control. There is a growing interest in research to derive robustness (and/or safety) guarantees for systems the dynamics of which are e…
This paper presents a novel methodology to model and optimize trajectories of a quadrupedal robot with spinal compliance to improve standing jump performance compared to quadrupeds with a rigid spine. We introduce an elastic model for a prismatic robotic spine that is actively preloaded and mechanic…
Soft pneumatic legged robots show promise in their ability to traverse a range of different types of terrain, including natural unstructured terrain met in applications like precision agriculture. They can adapt their body morphology to the intricacies of the terrain at hand, thus enabling robust an…
This work addresses task planning under uncertainty for precision agriculture applications whereby task costs are uncertain and the gain of completing a task is proportional to resource consumption (such as water consumption in precision irrigation). The goal is to complete all tasks while prioritiz
Collision detection and recovery for aerial robots remain a challenge because of the limited space for sensors and local stability of the flight controller. We introduce a novel collision-resilient quadrotor that features a compliant arm design to enable free flight while allowing for one passive de…
Collision avoidance in unknown obstacle-cluttered environments may not always be feasible. This paper focuses on an emerging paradigm shift in which potential collisions with the environment can be harnessed instead of being avoided altogether. To this end, we introduce a new sampling-based online p…
Online coverage planning can be useful in applications like field monitoring and search and rescue. Without prior information of the environment, achieving resolution-complete coverage considering the non-holonomic mobility constraints in commonly-used vehicles (e.g., wheeled robots) remains a chall
Soft robotics technology creates new ways for legged robots to interact with and adapt to their environment. In this paper we develop i) a new 2-degree-of-freedom soft pneumatic actuator, and ii) a novel soft robotic hexapedal robot called SoRX that leverages the new actuators. Simulation and physic…
The letter investigates how the behavior of small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is influenced by the system's close proximity to the ground/rigid surfaces both at hover and in forward flight. We perform an extensive experimental study where a quadrotor is tasked with flying in forward veloci
OpenRoACH is a 15-cm 200-gram self-contained hexapedal robot with an onboard single-board computer. To our knowledge, it is the smallest legged robot with the capability of running the Robot Operating System (ROS) onboard. The robot is fully open sourced, uses accessible materials and off-the-shelf…
Planning problems in partially observable environments cannot be solved directly with convolutional networks and require some form of memory. But, even memory networks with sophisticated addressing schemes are unable to learn intelligent reasoning satisfactorily due to the complexity of simultaneous…
The paper reports on the design and preliminary experimental testing of a novel 3D-printed miniature legged robot. It is called Passively Sprawling Robot (PSR), and it features a mechanism that achieves passive adjustment of the sprawl angle of the robot's legs. Passive sprawling in this robot exhib…