16 accepted papers
Semantic segmentation networks, which are essential for robotic perception, often suffer from performance degradation when the visual distribution of the deployment environment differs from that of the source dataset on which they were trained. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) addresses this cha…
Cloud robotics allows low-power robots to perform computationally intensive inference tasks by offloading them to the cloud, raising privacy concerns when transmitting sensitive images. Although end-to-end encryption secures data in transit, it does not prevent misuse by inquisitive third-party serv…
We consider the task of visually estimating the relative pose of a drone racing gate in front of a nano-quadrotor, using a convolutional neural network pre-trained on simulated data to regress the gate's pose. Due to the sim-to-real gap, the pre-trained model underperforms in the real world and must…
Graph patrolling algorithms provide effective strategies for coordinating mobile robots in the context of autonomously surveilling valuable assets. Optimizing patrolling strategies often aims to minimize the time between subsequent visits to a vertex, a measure known in the literature as idleness. I…
Multi-robot rendezvous and exploration are fundamental challenges in the domain of mobile robotic systems. This paper addresses multi-robot rendezvous within an initially unknown environment where communication is only possible after the rendezvous. Traditionally, exploration has been focused on rap…
Graph-patrolling problems in the adversarial domain typically embed models and assumptions about how hostile events, from which an environment must be protected, are generated at a specific time and location. Relying upon such attacker models prevents algorithms from synthesizing strategies that can…
We introduce a novel approach for scalable domain adaptation in cloud robotics scenarios where robots rely on third–party AI inference services powered by large pre– trained deep neural networks. Our method is based on a downstream proposal–refinement stage running locally on the robots, exploiting…
We study a patrolling problem where multiple agents are tasked with protecting an environment where one or more adversaries are trying to compromise targets of varying value. The objective of the patrollers is to move between targets to quickly spot when an attack is taking place and then diffuse it…
The employment of Social Assistive Robots (SARs) for monitoring elderly users represents a valuable gateway for at-home assistance. Their deployment in the house of the users can provide effective opportunities for early detection of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), a condition of increasing impact…
The use of autonomous robots for surveillance is one of the most interesting applications of graph-patrolling algorithms. In recent years, considerable effort has been devoted to tackling the problem of efficiently computing effective patrolling strategies. One of the mainstream approaches is advers…
In this paper, we consider the problem of maintaining and restoring connectivity among a set of agents (humans or robots) by incrementally redeploying a team of mobile robots acting as communication relays. This problem is relevant in numerous scenarios where humans and robots are jointly deployed f…
The most tight intractability results for graph-based Multirobot Path Planning (MPP), proven recently, state that time-optimal and distance-optimal MPP problems are NP-hard on planar graphs. In this letter, we go one step further for what concerns the time-optimal objectives, and prove that such pro
The importance of communication in many multirobot information-gathering tasks requires the availability of reliable communication maps. These provide estimates of the radio signal strength and can be used to predict the presence of communication links between different locations of the environment.…
In multirobot exploration under centralized control, communication plays an important role in constraining the team exploration strategy. Recurrent connectivity is a way to define communication constraints for which robots must connect to a base station only when making new observations. This paper
We consider the problem of providing surveillance to a grid area using multiple heterogeneous UAVs, named sentinels and searchers, with complementary sensing and actuation capabilities. We consider probabilistic attacks and we analyze the expected performance with respect to the team deployment. We…
We consider the problem of computing patrolling strategies under communication constraints for a team of autonomous robots employed in repeated surveillance missions on a set of predefined locations. We assume the presence of a communication infrastructure providing only some regions of the environm…