16 accepted papers
As autonomous vehicles (AVs) continue to gain prominence in public life, the cost of their failures becomes increasingly drastic, endangering human life. Such failures arise from AVs' inability to meet their safety specifications in the field. Recent works have aimed to improve AVs' compliance with …
Detecting objects in 3D space from monocular input is crucial for applications ranging from robotics to scene understanding. Despite advanced performance in the indoor and autonomous driving domains, existing monocular 3D detection models struggle with in-the-wild images due to the lack of 3D in-th…
There is a growing trend toward AI systems interacting with humans to revolutionize a range of application domains such as healthcare and transportation. However, unsafe human-machine interaction can lead to catastrophic failures. We propose a novel approach that predicts future states by accounting…
With the proliferation of autonomous vehicles (AVs) comes the need to ensure they abide by safe driving properties. Specifying and monitoring such properties, however, is challenging because of the mismatch between the semantic space over which typical driving properties are asserted (e.g., vehicles…
The spatial distribution of sensed objects strongly influences the behavior of mobile robots. Yet, as robots evolve in complexity to operate in increasingly rich environments, it becomes much more difficult to specify the underlying relations between sensed object spatial distributions and robot beh…
Robots operate under certain forces that affect their behavior. Consider, a drone meant to deliver packages must hold its pose as long as it operates under its weight and wind limits. Validating that such a drone handles external forces correctly is key to ensuring its safety. Nevertheless, validati…
Complex environments can cause robots to fail. Identifying the key elements of the environment associated with such failures is critical for faster fault isolation and, ultimately, debugging those failures. In this work we present the first automated approach for reducing the environment in which a…
Several independent approaches exist for state estimation and control of multirotor unmanned aerial systems (UASs) that address specific and constrained operational conditions. This work presents a complete end-to-end pipeline that enables precise, aggressive and agile maneuvers for multirotor UASs…
Testing mobile robots is difficult and expensive, and many faults go undetected. In this work we explore whether fuzzing, an automated test input generation technique, can more quickly find failure inducing inputs in mobile robots. We developed a simple fuzzing adaptation, BASE-FUZZ, and one special…
Simulation is at the core of validating autonomous systems (AS), enabling the detection of faults at a lower cost and earlier in the development life cycle. However, simulation can only produce an approximation of the real world, leading to a gap between simulation and reality where undesirable syst…
Prescribed fires can lessen wildfire severity and control invasive species, but they can also be risky and costly. Unmanned aerial systems can reduce those drawbacks by, for example, dropping ignition spheres to ignite the most hazardous areas. Existing systems, however, lack awareness of the fire v…
Sensor payloads suspended from parachutes are often used in atmospheric profiling applications. They drift freely and often end up landing in inaccessible regions that make their retrieval challenging or impossible. In this paper, we develop and evaluate an approach using a multirotor unmanned aeria…
Using an Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) to autonomously deploy soil sensors enables their installation in otherwise hard to access locations. In this paper, we present a system that integrates a UAS and a digging mechanism which can carry, secure, and install a small sensor into dirt effectively and…
This work presents a study of robot software using the Robot Operating System (ROS), focusing on detecting inconsistencies in physical unit manipulation. We discuss how dimensional analysis, the rules governing how physical quantities are combined, can be used to detect inconsistencies in robot soft…
Changes to robotic systems as they are updated or upgraded often affect the flow of control and sensor data. Developers and users spend a significant amount of time tracing the impact of these changes that could otherwise have negative impacts on the robot's performance and behavior. Changes to the…
Robotic systems often have complex configuration spaces that, when poorly set, can cause failures. In this work we take advantage of the close synergy between user and robot in co-robotic systems to better diagnose and overcome configuration failures. We leverage users' understanding of the system t…