14 accepted papers
Legged robots have the potential to traverse complex terrain and access confined spaces beyond the reach of traditional platforms thanks to their ability to carefully select footholds and flexibly adapt their body posture while walking. However, robust deployment in real-world applications is still…
Measurement update rules for Bayes filters often contain hand-crafted heuristics to compute observation probabilities for high-dimensional sensor data, like images. In this work, we propose the novel approach Deep Measurement Update (DMU) as a general update rule for a wide range of systems. DMU has
Perceiving the surrounding environment is crucial for autonomous mobile robots. An elevation map provides a memory-efficient and simple yet powerful geometric represen-tation of the terrain for ground robots. The robots can use this information for navigation in an unknown environment or perceptive…
Navigating off-road with a fast autonomous vehicle depends on a robust perception system that differentiates traversable from non-traversable terrain. Typically, this depends on a semantic understanding which is based on supervised learning from images annotated by a human expert. This requires a si…
In this work, we present a learning-based pipeline to realise local navigation with a quadrupedal robot in cluttered environments with static and dynamic obstacles. Given high-level navigation commands, the robot is able to safely locomote to a target location based on frames from a depth camera wit
Navigation on challenging terrain topographies requires the understanding of robots’ locomotion capabilities to produce optimal solutions. We present an integrated framework for real-time autonomous navigation of mobile robots based on elevation maps. The framework performs rapid global path plannin…
Navigation planning for legged robots has distinct challenges compared to wheeled and tracked systems due to the ability to lift legs off the ground and step over obstacles. While most navigation planners assume a fixed traversability value for a single terrain patch, we overcome this limitation by…
Navigation in natural outdoor environments requires a robust and reliable traversability classification method to handle the plethora of situations a robot can encounter. Binary classification algorithms perform well in their native domain but tend to provide overconfident predictions when presented
Planetary exploration robots encounter challenging terrain during operation. Vision-based approaches have failed to reliably predict soil characteristics in the past, making it necessary to probe the terrain tactilely. We present a robust, haptic inspection approach for a variety of fine, granular m
The high agility of legged systems allows them to operate in rugged outdoor environments. In these situations, knowledge about the terrain geometry is key for foothold planning to enable safe locomotion. However, on penetrable or highly compliant terrain (e.g. grass) the visibility of the supporting…
Legged robots have the ability to adapt their walking posture to navigate confined spaces due to their high degrees of freedom. However, this has not been exploited in most common multilegged platforms. This letter presents a deformable bounding box abstraction of the robot model, with accompanying
Mobile robots are becoming very popular in real-world outdoors applications, where there are many challenges in robot control and perception. One of the most critical problems is to characterise the terrain traversed by the robot. This knowledge is indispensable for optimal terrain negotiation. Curr…
Legged robots have the potential to traverse diverse and rugged terrain. To find a safe and efficient navigation path and to carefully select individual footholds, it is useful to be able to predict properties of the terrain ahead of the robot. In this letter, we propose a method to collect data fro
Current traffic rule handling in autonomous driving relies on non-scalable methods such as explicitly hard-coding sets of logical statements to evaluate rules. This is sufficient for early prototypes but is not scalable for larger systems designed to work in arbitrary locations. Such methods can als…