12 accepted papers
This paper addresses the Dynamic UGV-UAV Cooperative Path Planning (DUCPP) problem involving one unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) assisted by one or more unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) operating on an uncertain road network with potentially impassable edges. DUCPP is particularly relevant for scenario…
Environmental monitoring robots often need to reconstruct spatial fields (e.g., salinity, temperature, bathymetry) under tight distance and energy constraints. Classical boustrophedon lawnmower surveys provide geometric coverage guarantees but can waste effort by oversampling predictable regions. In…
We study cooperative shortest path planning for an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) assisted by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in environments with unknown road blockages that are only discovered when a robot reaches the damaged point. This formulation generalizes the original Canadian Traveller Prob…
Autonomous robots can survey and monitor large environments. However, these robots often have limited compu-tational and power resources, making it crucial to develop an ef-ficient and adaptive informative path planning (IPP) algorithm. Such an algorithm must quickly adapt to environmental data to m
This paper addresses multi-robot informative path planning (IPP) for environmental monitoring. The problem involves determining informative regions in the environment that should be visited by robots to gather the most information about the environment. We propose an efficient sparse Gaussian proces…
This paper addresses the problem of robotic exploration of unknown indoor environments with deadlines. Indoor exploration using mobile robots has typically focused on exploring the entire environment without considering deadlines. The objective of the prioritized exploration in this paper is to rapi…
The area coverage problem is the task of efficiently servicing a given two-dimensional surface using sensors mounted on robots such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). We present a novel formulation for generating coverage routes for multiple capacity-constrained
Harmful greenhouse gases such as methane are prone to leak during extraction, transportation, and storage in oil fields. Therefore we must monitor gas leak rates to keep such fugitive emissions in check. However, most currently available approaches incur significant computational costs to generate i
Indoor exploration using mobile robots has typically focused on exploring the entire environment without considering deadlines. This paper introduces a priority-based exploration algorithm for situations with an initially unknown and dynamically assigned deadline. The goal of our exploration strateg…
The line coverage problem is the coverage of linear environment features (e.g., road networks, power lines), modeled as 1D segments, by one or more robots while respecting resource constraints (e.g., battery capacity, flight time) for each of the robots. The robots incur direction dependent costs an…
This paper presents algorithms to simultaneously compute the optimal assignments and formation parameters for a team of robots from a given initial formation to a variable goal formation (where the shape of the goal formation is given, and its scale and location parameters must be optimized). We ass…
We present a trajectory optimization formulation for the design of a sit-to-stand assistive device for humans with motion impairments. We develop a constrained Lagrangian to derive the equations of motion for the trajectory optimization formulation. Such a Lagrangian enables us to impose constraints