15 accepted papers
Autonomous exploration of unknown 3D environments requires motion planners that can efficiently identify informative regions to explore while continuously adapting to the evolving map of the environment. While existing sampling-based methods have demonstrated strong real-time performance, they often
Autonomous exploration of unknown 3D environments requires motion planners that can efficiently identify informative regions to explore while continuously adapting to the evolving map of the environment. While existing sampling-based methods have demonstrated strong real-time performance, they often…
Certain forms of uncertainty that robotic systems encounter can be explicitly learned within the context of a known model, like parametric model uncertainties such as mass and moments of inertia. Quantifying such parametric uncertainty is important for more accurate prediction of the system behavior
Mobile social robots should be able to engage in interaction with people effectively. However, greeting someone is a complex task since it implies an exchange of social signals. Adam Kendon modeled human greetings as a set of six phases: initiation of approach, distance salutation, head dip, approac…
Space free-flyers like the Astrobee robots currently operating aboard the International Space Station must operate with inherent system uncertainties. Parametric uncertainties like mass and moment of inertia are especially important to quantify in these safety-critical space systems and can change i…
The performance of model-based motion control for free-flying robots relies on accurate estimation of their parameters. In this work, a method of rigid body inertial parameter estimation which relies on a variational approach is presented. Instead of discretizing the continuous equations of motion,…
This article addresses an Active cooperative perception problem for networked robots systems. Given a team of networked robots, the goal is finding a target using their inherent uncertain sensor data. The article proposes a particle filter to model the probability distribution of the position of the
Typically, the problem of robotic manipulation is divided among two sequential phases: a planning one and an execution one. However, since the second one is executed in open loop, the robot is unable to react in real time to changes in the task (e.g. moving object). This paper addresses the mobile m…
HTC Vive has been gaining attention as a cost-effective, off-the-shelf tracking system for collecting ground truth pose data. We assess this system's pose estimation through a series of controlled experiments where we show its precision to be in the millimeter magnitude and accuracy to range from mi…
Despite the recent success of state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms in object recognition, when these are deployed as-is on a mobile service robot, we observed that they failed to recognize many objects in real human environments. In this paper, we introduce a learning algorithm in which robots…
In this work we study the efficient search of objects in domestic environments, using probabilistic logic to represent uncertainty about object location and partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP) for the decision-making process regarding the movements to be carried out by the robot t…
This paper addresses the problem of having a robot executing motor tasks requested by a human through spoken language. Verbal instructions do not typically have a one-to-one mapping to robot actions, due to various reasons: economy of spoken language, e.g., one short instruction might indeed corresp
Multi-robot cooperative navigation in real-world environments is essential in many applications, including surveillance and search-and-rescue missions. State-of-the-art methods for cooperative navigation are often tested in ideal laboratory conditions and not ready to be deployed in real-world envir…
This paper presents the design of a small aerial robot for inhabited microgravity environments, such as orbiting space stations (e.g., ISS). In particular, we target a fleet of robots, called Space CoBots, for collaborative tasks with humans, such as telepresence and cooperative mobile manipulation.…
In this paper we address the 3D reconstruction of points, on a non-central catadioptric system, composed by a mirror, a projector, and a perspective camera. The goal of the paper is to propose a framework to build an omnidirectional depth camera, towards an omnidirectional RGB-D camera system. The m…