9 accepted papers
A central challenge in lifelong imitation learning (LIL) is enabling agents to acquire new skills from expert demonstrations while retaining knowledge of previously learned tasks. Achieving this requires preserving the low-dimensional manifolds and geometric structures that underlie task representat…
We present MMD-Reg, a novel correspondence-free approach to point-cloud registration that is differentiable and has linear computational complexity in the number of points. We model registration as a nonlinear least-squares problem based on the Maximum Mean Discrepancy, approximated using random Fou…
Detecting air flows caused by phenomena such as heat convection is valuable in multiple scenarios, including leak identification and locating thermal updrafts for extending UAV flight duration. Unfortunately, the heat signature of these flows is often too subtle to be seen by a thermal camera. While…
Hybrid unmanned aerial vehicles (H-UAVs) are highly versatile platforms with the ability to transition between rotary- and fixed-wing flight. However, their (aero)dynamics tend to be highly nonlinear which increases the risk of introducing safety-critical modeling errors in a controller. Designing a…
Small uncrewed aerial systems (sUASs) are useful tools for 3D reconstruction due to their speed, ease of use, and ability to access high-utility viewpoints. Today, most aerial survey approaches generate a preplanned coverage pattern assuming a planar target region. However, this is inefficient since…
Autonomous navigation among people is a com-plex problem that also exhibits considerable variation depending on the type of environment and people involved. Here we consider navigation among crowds that exhibit flow-like behavior like people moving through a train station. We propose a novel pseudo-…
Bilateral teleoperation offers an intriguing solution towards shared autonomy with aerial vehicles in contact-based inspection and manipulation tasks. Omnidirectional aerial robots allow for full pose operations, making them particularly attractive in such tasks. Naturally, the question arises wheth…
For asymptotically optimal sampling-based path planners such as RRT*, path quality improves as the number of samples added to the motion tree increases. However, each additional sample requires a nearest-neighbor search. Calculating state transition costs can be particularly difficult in cases with…
While optical cameras are ubiquitous in robotics, some robots can sense the world in several sections of the electromagnetic spectrum simultaneously, which can extend their capabilities in fundamental ways. For instance, many fixed-wing UAVs carry both optical and thermal imaging cameras, potentiall