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Thomas Touma

7 accepted papers

2026

Safe Payload Transfer with Ship-Mounted Cranes: A Robust Model Predictive Control Approach

ICRA 2026poster

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…

2024

A Learning-Based Framework for Safe Human-Robot Collaboration with Multiple Backup Control Barrier Functions

ICRA 2024poster

Ensuring robot safety in complex environments is a difficult task due to actuation limits, such as torque bounds. This paper presents a safety-critical control framework that leverages learning-based switching between multiple backup controllers to formally guarantee safety under bounded control inp…

Cited by 4SourceScholar
2022

ACHORD: Communication-Aware Multi-Robot Coordination With Intermittent Connectivity

RA-L 2022

Communication is an important capability for multi-robot exploration because (1) inter-robot communication (comms) improves coverage efficiency and (2) robot-to-base comms improves situational awareness. Exploring comms-restricted (e.g., subterranean) environments requires a multi-robot system to to

Cited by 35SourceScholar
2022

Early Recall, Late Precision: Multi-Robot Semantic Object Mapping under Operational Constraints in Perceptually-Degraded Environments

IROS 2022poster

Semantic object mapping in uncertain, perceptually degraded environments during long-range multi-robot autonomous exploration tasks such as search-and-rescue is important and challenging. During such missions, high recall is desirable to avoid missing true target objects and high precision is also c…

Cited by 5SourceScholar
2022

PrePARE: Predictive Proprioception for Agile Failure Event Detection in Robotic Exploration of Extreme Terrains

IROS 2022poster

Legged robots can traverse a wide variety of terrains, some of which may be challenging for wheeled robots, such as stairs or highly uneven surfaces. However, quadruped robots face stability challenges on slippery surfaces. This can be resolved by adjusting the robot's locomotion by switching to mor…

Cited by 9SourceScholar
2020

Autonomous Spot: Long-Range Autonomous Exploration of Extreme Environments with Legged Locomotion

IROS 2020poster

This paper serves as one of the first efforts to enable large-scale and long-duration autonomy using the Boston Dynamics Spot robot. Motivated by exploring extreme environments, particularly those involved in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge, this paper pushes the boundaries of the state-of-practice…

Cited by 198SourceScholar