24 accepted papers
Recent advances in quadrupedal locomotion have focused on improving stability and performance across diverse environments. However, existing methods often lack adequate safety analysis and struggle to adapt to varying payloads and complex terrains, typically requiring extensive tuning. To overcome t…
Long-term state estimation over graphs remains challenging as current graph estimation methods scale poorly on large, long-term graphs. To address this, our work advances a current state-of-the-art graph sparsification algorithm, maximizing algebraic connectivity (MAC). MAC is a sparsification metho…
Motivated by the problem of pursuit-evasion, we present a motion planning framework that combines energy-based diffusion models with artificial potential fields for robust real time trajectory generation in complex environments. Our approach processes obstacle information directly from point clouds,…
Robotic perception often requires solving large nonlinear least-squares (NLS) problems. While sparsity has been well-exploited to scale solvers, a complementary and underexploited structure is emph{separability} -- where some variables (e.g., visual landmarks) enter the residuals linearly and, for a…
Recent advances in quadrupedal locomotion have focused on improving stability and performance across diverse environments. However, existing methods often lack adequate safety analysis and struggle to adapt to varying payloads and complex terrains, typically requiring extensive tuning. To overcome t
A key open challenge in off-road autonomy is that the traversability of terrain often depends on the vehicle's state. In particular, some obstacles are only traversable from some orientations. However, learning this interaction by encoding the angle of approach as a model input demands a large and d…
SLAM is an important capability for many autonomous systems, and modern LiDAR-based methods offer promising performance. However, for long duration missions, existing works that either take directly the full pointclouds or extracted features face key tradeoffs in accuracy and computational efficienc
Motivated by the problem of pursuit-evasion, we present a motion planning framework that combines energy-based diffusion models with artificial potential fields for robust real time trajectory generation in complex environments. Our approach processes obstacle information directly from point clouds,
A key challenge in off-road navigation is that even visually similar terrains or ones from the same semantic class may have substantially different traction properties. Existing work typically assumes no wheel slip or uses the expected traction for motion planning, where the predicted trajectories p…
A key challenge in fast ground robot navigation in 3D terrain is balancing robot speed and safety. Recent work has shown that 2.5D maps (2D representations with additional 3D information) are ideal for real-time safe and fast planning. However, the prevalent approach of generating 2D occupancy grids…
We propose a demonstration-efficient strategy to compress a computationally expensive Model Predictive Controller (MPC) into a more computationally efficient representation based on a deep neural network and Imitation Learning (IL). By generating a Robust Tube variant (RTMPC) of the MPC and leveragi…
The main challenge of multiagent reinforcement learning is the difficulty of learning useful policies in the presence of other simultaneously learning agents whose changing behaviors jointly affect the environment's transition and reward dynamics. An effective approach that has recently emerged for…
Motion planning in off-road environments re-quires reasoning about both the geometry and semantics of the scene (e.g., a robot may be able to drive through soft bushes but not a fallen log). In many recent works, the world is classified into a finite number of semantic categories that often are not…
Neural Networks (NNs) can provide major empirical performance improvements for robotic systems, but they also introduce challenges in formally analyzing those systems’ safety properties. In particular, this work focuses on estimating the forward reachable set of closed-loop systems with NN controlle…
Robotic navigation in environments shared with other robots or humans remains challenging because the intentions of the surrounding agents are not directly observable and the environment conditions are continuously changing. Local trajectory optimization methods, such as model predictive control (MP
This letter introduces a hybrid algorithm of deep reinforcement learning (RL) and Force-based motion planning (FMP) to solve distributed motion planning problem in dense and dynamic environments. Individually, RL and FMP algorithms each have their own limitations. FMP is not able to produce time-opt
Deep Neural Network-based systems are now the state-of-the-art in many robotics tasks, but their application in safety-critical domains remains dangerous without formal guarantees on network robustness. Small perturbations to sensor inputs (from noise or adversarial examples) are often enough to cha
Last-mile delivery systems commonly propose the use of autonomous robotic vehicles to increase scalability and efficiency. The economic inefficiency of collecting accurate prior maps for navigation motivates the use of planning algorithms that operate in unmapped environments. However, these algorit…
Many current autonomous systems are being designed with a strong reliance on black box predictions from deep neural networks (DNNs). However, DNNs tend to be overconfident in predictions on unseen data and can give unpredictable results for far-from-distribution test data. The importance of predicti…
Robots that navigate among pedestrians use collision avoidance algorithms to enable safe and efficient operation. Recent works present deep reinforcement learning as a framework to model the complex interactions and cooperation. However, they are implemented using key assumptions about other agents'…
Finding feasible, collision-free paths for multiagent systems can be challenging, particularly in non-communicating scenarios where each agent's intent (e.g. goal) is unobservable to the others. In particular, finding time efficient paths often requires anticipating interaction with neighboring agen…
This paper presents the first ever approach for solving continuous-observation Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (Dec-POMDPs) and their semi-Markovian counterparts, Dec-POSMDPs. This contribution is especially important in robotics, where a vast number of sensors provide c…
Robust environment perception is essential for decision-making on robots operating in complex domains. Intelligent task execution requires principled treatment of uncertainty sources in a robot's observation model. This is important not only for low-level observations (e.g., accelerom-eter data), bu…
For robotic vehicles to navigate safely and efficiently in pedestrian-rich environments, it is important to model subtle human behaviors and navigation rules (e.g., passing on the right). However, while instinctive to humans, socially compliant navigation is still difficult to quantify due to the st…