14 accepted papers
Ensuring safe real-time control of ship-mounted cranes in unstructured transportation environments requires handling multiple safety constraints while maintaining effective payload transfer performance. Unlike traditional crane systems, ship-mounted cranes are consistently subjected to significant e…
Snake robots enable mobility through extreme terrains and confined environments in terrestrial and space applications. However, robust perception and localization for snake robots remain an open challenge due to the proximity of the sensor payload to the ground coupled with a limited field of view.
The discovery of ocean worlds such as Enceladus, Titan, and Europa motivates the development of versatile autonomous mobility systems to enable the next era of space exploration where there is large uncertainty in terrain specifications due to a lack of prior surface reconnaissance missions. To expl…
The Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) is a snake-like mobile instruments platform under development at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for a mission concept to find evidence of life on Saturn's sixth largest moon, Enceladus. To conduct a life surveying mission there, the EELS platform must firs…
Autonomous driving is complex, requiring sophisticated 3D scene understanding, localization, mapping, and control. Rather than explicitly modelling and fusing each of these components, we instead consider an end-to-end approach via reinforcement learning (RL). However, collecting exploration driving…
Deep learning has enjoyed much recent success, and applying state-of-the-art model learning methods to controls is an exciting prospect. However, there is a strong reluctance to use these methods on safety-critical systems, which have constraints on safety, stability, and real-time performance. We p…
In addition to conventional ground rovers, the Mars 2020 mission will send a helicopter to Mars. The copter's highresolution data helps the rover to identify small hazards such as steps and pointy rocks, as well as providing rich textual information useful to predict perception performance. In this
Hybrid ground and aerial vehicles can possess distinct advantages over ground-only or flight-only designs in terms of energy savings and increased mobility. In this work we outline our unified framework for controls, planning, and autonomy of hybrid ground/air vehicles. Our contribution is three-fol…
Decision-making under uncertainty is a crucial ability for autonomous systems. In its most general form, this problem can be formulated as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). The solution policy of a POMDP can be implicitly encoded as a value function. In partially observable set
Thermal cameras can enable autonomous flight at night without GPS. However, image-based navigation in the thermal infrared spectrum has been researched significantly less than in the visible spectrum. In this paper, we demonstrate closed-loop controlled outdoor flights at night on a quadrotor. Our s…
For autonomous quadrotors to be used for applications such as delivery, disaster response, and inspection, there is a need to fly near obstacles, especially in urban and indoor environments. Often, it is also beneficial to fly at high speeds to complete tasks quickly. A key challenge in enabling the
Aggressive maneuvering amongst obstacles could enable advanced capabilities for quadrotors in applications such as search and rescue, surveillance, inspection, and situations where rapid flight is required in cluttered environments. Previous works have treated quadrotors as differentially flat syste…
Asymptotically-optimal motion planners such as RRT* have been shown to incrementally approximate the shortest path between start and goal states. Once an initial solution is found, their performance can be dramatically improved by restricting subsequent samples to regions of the state space that can…
As a step towards achieving autonomy in space exploration missions, we consider a cooperative robotics system consisting of a copter and a rover. The goal of the copter is to explore an unknown environment so as to maximize knowledge about a science mission expressed in linear temporal logic that is…