19 accepted papers
Underwater environments impose severe challenges to visual-inertial odometry systems, as strong light attenuation, marine snow and turbidity, together with weakly exciting motions, degrade inertial observability and cause frequent tracking failures over long-term operation. While tightly coupled aco
Convex polytopes have compact representations and exhibit convexity, which makes them suitable for abstracting obstacle-free spaces from various environments. Existing generation methods struggle with balancing high-quality output and efficiency. Moreover, another crucial requirement for convex poly…
In this paper, we propose FastViDAR, a novel framework that takes four fisheye camera inputs and produces a full 360 depth map along with per-camera depth, fusion depth, and confidence estimates. Our main contributions are: (1) We introduce Alternative Hierarchical Attention (AHA) mechanism that eff…
Reconstructing large-scale RGB point clouds is an important task in robotics, supporting perception, navigation, and scene understanding. Despite advances in LiDAR inertial visual odometry (LIVO), its performance remains highly sensitive to extrinsic calibration. Meanwhile, 3D vision foundation mode
A long-cherished vision of drones is to autonomously traverse through clutter to reach every corner of the world using onboard sensing and computation. In this paper, we combine onboard 3D lidar sensing and sim-to-real reinforcement learning (RL) to enable autonomous flight in cluttered environments
Drone racing has become a popular international competition and has attained wide attention in recent years. However, the requirements of high-level operation keep the novice pilots away from participating in it. This paper presents a trajectory-based flight assistive system that enables various ope…
Collision is typically avoided in robot navigation for safety guarantee. However, when a robot’s exteroceptive sensors fail, which means it becomes "blind", collision can actually be leveraged to improve localization performance. Our research demonstrates the informative nature of collisions in this…
Just as humans can become disoriented in featureless deserts or thick fogs, not all environments are conducive to the Localization Accuracy and Stability (LAS) of autonomous robots. This paper introduces an efficient framework designed to enhance LiDAR-based LAS through strategic trajectory generati…
Collision evaluation is of essential importance in various applications. However, existing methods are either cumbersome to calculate or not exact. Therefore, considering the cost of implementation, most whole-body planning works, which require evaluating collision between robots and environments, s…
The advance of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has enabled customers and directors to film from the air. However, operating the drone to produce desired videos upon a moving object is hard to achieve. This letter proposes an autonomous aerial videography system that integrates customized shots and d
In recent years, there is a noteworthy advance-ment in autonomous drone racing. However, the primary focus is on attaining execution times, while scant attention is given to the challenges of dynamic environments. The high-speed nature of racing scenarios, coupled with the potential for unforeseeabl…
For letting mobile robots travel flexibly through complicated environments, increasing attention has been paid to the whole-body collision evaluation. Most existing works either opt for the conservative corridor-based methods that impose strict requirements on the corridor generation, or ESDF-based…
For real-time multirotor kinodynamic planning, the efficiency of sampling-based methods is usually hindered by difficult-to-sample homotopy classes like narrow passages. In this paper, we address this issue by a hybrid scheme. We firstly propose a fast regional optimizer exploiting the information o…
Gaze isan intuitive and direct way to represent the intentions of an individual. However, when it comes to assistive aerial teleoperation which aims to perform operators’ intention, rare attention has been paid to gaze. Existing methods obtain intention directly from the remote controller (RC) input
The visible capability is critical in many robot applications, such as inspection and surveillance, etc. Without the assurance of the visibility to targets, some tasks end up not being complete or even failing. In this paper, we propose a visibility guaranteed planner by star-convex constrained opti…
In this paper, we introduce a complete system for autonomous flight of quadrotors in dynamic environments with onboard sensing. Extended from existing work, we develop an occlusion-aware dynamic perception method based on depth images, which classifies obstacles as dynamic and static. For representi…
In autonomous navigation, sensors suffer from massive occlusion in cluttered environments, leaving a significant amount of space unknown. In practice, treating the unknown space in optimistic or pessimistic ways both set limitations on planning performance. Therefore, aggressiveness and safety canno…
The visibility of targets determines performance and even success rate of various applications, such as active slam, exploration, and target tracking. Therefore, it is crucial to take the visibility of targets into explicit account in trajectory planning. In this paper, we propose a general metric f…