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Vijay Kumar

178 accepted papers

2026

Air-Ground Collaboration for Language-Specified Missions in Unknown Environments (I)

Fernando Cladera, Zachary Ravichandran, Jason Hughes, Varun Murali, Carlos Nieto-Granda, M. Ani Hsieh +3
ICRA 2026poster

As autonomous robotic systems become increasingly mature, users will want to specify missions at the level of intent rather than in low-level detail. Language is an expressive and intuitive medium for such mission specification. However, realizing language-guided robotic teams requires overcoming si…

Cited by 0Scholar ↗
2026

HALO: Language-Conditioned Overhead Monocular Aerial Exploration and Navigation

Yuezhan Tao, Dexter Ong, Fernando Cladera, Jason Hughes, Camillo J. Taylor, Pratik Chaudhari +1
RA-L 2026

We demonstrate real-time overhead aerial metric-semantic mapping and exploration using a monocular camera paired with a global positioning system (GPS). Our system, named HALO, addresses two key challenges: (i) real-time dense 3D reconstruction using vision at large distances, and (ii) mapping and e

Cited by 0Source ↗Scholar ↗
2026

LPAC: Learnable Perception-Action-Communication Loops with Applications to Coverage Control

Saurav Agarwal, Ramya Muthukrishnan, Walker Gosrich, Vijay Kumar, Alejandro Ribeiro
ICRA 2026poster

Coverage control is the problem of navigating a robot swarm to collaboratively monitor features or a phenomenon of interest not known a priori . The problem is challenging in decentralized settings with robots that have limited communication and sensing capabilities. We propose a learnable Perceptio…

Cited by 0Source ↗PDF ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2026

RT-GuIDE: Real-Time Gaussian Splatting for Information-Driven Exploration

Yuezhan Tao, Dexter Ong, Varun Murali, Igor Spasojevic, Pratik Chaudhari, Vijay Kumar
ICRA 2026poster

We propose a framework for active mapping and exploration that leverages Gaussian splatting for constructing dense maps. Further, we develop a GPU-accelerated motion planning algorithm that can exploit the Gaussian map for real-time navigation. The Gaussian map constructed onboard the robot is optim…

Cited by 0Source ↗PDF ↗Scholar ↗
2026

Real-Time Glass Detection and Reprojection Using Sensor Fusion Onboard Aerial Robots

Malakhi Hopkins, Varun Murali, Vijay Kumar, Camillo Jose Taylor
ICRA 2026poster

Autonomous aerial robots are increasingly being deployed in real-world scenarios, where transparent obstacles present significant challenges to reliable navigation and mapping. These materials pose a unique problem for traditional perception systems because they lack discernible features and can cau…

Cited by 0Source ↗PDF ↗Scholar ↗
2026

Safety Guardrails for LLM-Enabled Robots

Zachary Ravichandran, Alexander Robey, Vijay Kumar, George J. Pappas, Hamed Hassani
RA-L 2026

Although the integration of large language models (LLMs) into robotics has unlocked transformative capabilities, it has also introduced significant safety concerns, ranging from average-case LLM errors (<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"

Cited by 30Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2026

SymSkill: Symbol and Skill Co-Invention for Data-Efficient and Reactive Long-Horizon Manipulation

Yifei Shao, Yuchen Zheng, Sunan Sun, Pratik Chaudhari, Vijay Kumar, Nadia Figueroa
ICRA 2026poster

Multi-step manipulation in dynamic environments remains challenging. Imitation learning (IL) is reactive but lacks compositional generalization, since monolithic policies do not decide which skill to reuse when scenes change. Classical task-and-motion planning (TAMP) offers compositionality, but its…

Cited by 0Source ↗PDF ↗Scholar ↗
2026

Towards Optimizing a Convex Cover of Collision-Free Space for Trajectory Generation

Yuwei Wu, Igor Spasojevic, Pratik Chaudhari, Vijay Kumar
ICRA 2026poster

We propose an online iterative algorithm to optimize a convex cover to under-approximate the free space for autonomous navigation to delineate Safe Flight Corridors (SFC). The convex cover consists of a set of polytopes such that the union of the polytopes represents obstacle-free space, allowing us…

Cited by 0Source ↗PDF ↗Scholar ↗
2025

ADMM-MCBF-LCA: A Layered Control Architecture for Safe Real-Time Navigation

Anusha Srikanthan, Yifan Xue, Vijay Kumar, Nikolai Matni, Nadia Figueroa
ICRA 2025

We consider the problem of safe real-time navigation of a robot in a dynamic environment with moving obstacles of arbitrary smooth geometries and input saturation constraints. We assume that the robot detects and models nearby obstacle boundaries with a short-range sensor and that this detection is

Cited by 1Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2025

An Active Perception Game for Robust Information Gathering

Siming He, Yuezhan Tao, Igor Spasojevic, Vijay Kumar, Pratik Chaudhari
ICRA 2025

Active perception approaches select future viewpoints by using some estimate of the information gain. An inaccurate estimate can be detrimental in critical situations, e.g., locating a person in distress. However the true information gained can only be calculated post hoc, i.e., after the observatio

Cited by 0Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2025

Constrained Learning for Decentralized Multi-Objective Coverage Control

Juan Cerviño, Saurav Agarwal, Vijay Kumar, Alejandro Ribeiro
ICRA 2025

The multi-objective coverage control problem requires a robot swarm to collaboratively provide sensor coverage to multiple heterogeneous importance density fields (IDFs) simultaneously. We pose this as an optimization problem with constraints and study two different formulations: (1) Fair coverage,

Cited by 0Source ↗Scholar ↗
2025

Distilling On-device Language Models for Robot Planning with Minimal Human Intervention

Zachary Ravichandran, Ignacio Hounie, Fernando Cladera, Alejandro Ribeiro, George J. Pappas, Vijay Kumar
CoRL 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) provide robots with powerful contextual reasoning abilities and a natural human interface. Yet, current LLM-enabled robots typically depend on cloud-hosted models, limiting their usability in environments with unreliable communication infrastructure, such as outdoor or i…

Cited by 0Source ↗Scholar ↗
2025

EvMAPPER: High-Altitude Orthomapping with Event Cameras

Fernando Cladera, Kenneth Chaney, M. Ani Hsieh, Camillo J. Taylor, Vijay Kumar
ICRA 2025

Traditionally, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) rely on CMOS-based cameras to collect images about the world below. One of the most successful applications of UAVs is to generate orthomosaics or orthomaps, in which a series of images are integrated to develop a larger map. However, using CMOS-based c

Cited by 3Source ↗Scholar ↗
2025

KoopMotion: Learning Almost Divergence Free Koopman Flow Fields for Motion Planning

Alice Kate Li, Thales C. Silva, Victoria Edwards, Vijay Kumar, M. Ani Hsieh
CoRL 2025poster

In this work, we propose a novel flow field-based motion planning method that drives a robot from any initial state to a desired reference trajectory such that it converges to the trajectory's end point. Despite demonstrated efficacy in using Koopman operator theory for modeling dynamical systems,…

Cited by 0Source ↗Scholar ↗
2025

Leveling the Playing Field: Carefully Comparing Classical and Learned Controllers for Quadrotor Trajectory Tracking

Pratik Kunapuli, Jake Welde, Dinesh Jayaraman, Vijay Kumar
RSS 2025poster

Learning-based control approaches like reinforcement learning (RL) have recently produced a slew of impressive results for tasks like quadrotor trajectory tracking and drone racing. Naturally, it is common to demonstrate the advantages of these new controllers against established methods like analyt…

Cited by 0PDF ↗Scholar ↗
2025

Leveraging Symmetry to Accelerate Learning of Trajectory Tracking Controllers for Free-Flying Robotic Systems

Jake Welde, Nishanth Rao, Pratik Kunapuli, Dinesh Jayaraman, Vijay Kumar
ICRA 2025

Tracking controllers enable robotic systems to accurately follow planned reference trajectories. In particular, reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in the synthesis of controllers for systems with complex dynamics and modest online compute budgets. However, the poor sample efficiency of RL

Cited by 3Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2025

RT-GuIDE: Real-Time Gaussian Splatting for Information-Driven Exploration

Yuezhan Tao, Dexter Ong, Varun Murali, Igor Spasojevic, Pratik Chaudhari, Vijay Kumar
RA-L 2025

We propose a framework for active mapping and exploration that leverages Gaussian splatting for constructing dense maps. Further, we develop a GPU-accelerated motion planning algorithm that can exploit the Gaussian map for real-time navigation. The Gaussian map constructed onboard the robot is optim

Cited by 14Source ↗Scholar ↗
2025

Resilient Multi-Robot Target Tracking with Sensing and Communication Danger Zones

Peihan Li, Yuwei Wu, Jiazhen Liu, Gaurav S. Sukhatme, Vijay Kumar, Lifeng Zhou
IROS 2025

Multi-robot collaboration for target tracking in adversarial environments poses significant challenges, including system failures, dynamic priority shifts, and other unpredictable factors. These challenges become even more pronounced when the environment is unknown. In this paper, we propose a resil

Cited by 1Source ↗Scholar ↗
2025

SPINE: Online Semantic Planning for Missions with Incomplete Natural Language Specifications in Unstructured Environments

Zachary Ravichandran, Varun Murali, Mariliza Tzes, George J. Pappas, Vijay Kumar
ICRA 2025

As robots become increasingly capable, users will want to describe high-level missions and have robots infer the relevant details. Because pre-built maps are difficult to obtain in many realistic settings, accomplishing such missions will require the robot to map and plan online. While many semantic

Cited by 25Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2025

Sequence Modeling for Time-Optimal Quadrotor Trajectory Optimization with Sampling-based Robustness Analysis

Katherine Mao, Hongzhan Yu, Ruipeng Zhang, Igor Spasojevic, Sicun Gao, Vijay Kumar
CoRL 2025poster

Time-optimal trajectories drive quadrotors to their dynamic limits, but computing such trajectories involves solving non-convex problems via iterative nonlinear optimization, making them prohibitively costly for real-time applications. In this work, we investigate learning-based models that imitate…

Cited by 0Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2025

Towards Optimizing a Convex Cover of Collision-Free Space for Trajectory Generation

Yuwei Wu, Igor Spasojevic, Pratik Chaudhari, Vijay Kumar
RA-L 2025

We propose an online iterative algorithm to optimize a convex cover to under-approximate the free space for autonomous navigation to delineate Safe Flight Corridors (SFC). The convex cover consists of a set of polytopes such that the union of the polytopes represents obstacle-free space, allowing us

Cited by 10Source ↗Scholar ↗
2025

Towards Safe and Energy-Efficient Real-Time Motion Planning in Windy Urban Environments

Spencer Folk, John Melton, Benjamin W. L. Margolis, Mark Yim, Vijay Kumar
ICRA 2025

Urban winds are a serious hazard for low-altitude autonomous aerial operations in urban airspaces. Previous methods for motion planning in urban winds require global knowledge of the obstacles and flow field and do not lend themselves to real-time application. In this paper, a planning and control f

Cited by 2Source ↗Scholar ↗
2025

Vision Transformers for End-to-End Vision-Based Quadrotor Obstacle Avoidance

Anish Bhattacharya, Nishanth Rao, Dhruv Parikh, Pratik Kunapuli, Yuwei Wu, Yuezhan Tao +2
ICRA 2025

We demonstrate the capabilities of an attentionbased end-to-end approach for high-speed vision-based quadrotor obstacle avoidance in dense, cluttered environments, with comparison to various state-of-the-art learning architectures. Quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have tremendous maneuverab

Cited by 22Source ↗Scholar ↗
2024

Constraint-Aware Intent Estimation for Dynamic Human-Robot Object Co-Manipulation

Yifei Simon Shao, Tianyu Li, Shafagh Keyvanian, Pratik Chaudhari, Vijay Kumar, Nadia Figueroa
RSS 2024poster

Constraint-aware estimation of human intent is essential for robots to physically collaborate and interact with humans. Further, to achieve fluid collaboration in dynamic tasks intent estimation should be achieved in real-time. In this paper, we present a framework that combines online estimation an…

Cited by 6Source ↗PDF ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2024

Design and Evaluation of Motion Planners for Quadrotors in Environments with Varying Complexities

Yifei Simon Shao, Yuwei Wu, Laura Jarin-Lipschitz, Pratik Chaudhari, Vijay Kumar
ICRA 2024poster

Motion planning techniques for quadrotors have advanced significantly over the past decade. Most successful planners have two stages: a front-end that determines a path that incorporates geometric (or kinematic or input) constraints and specifies the homotopy class of the trajectory, and a back-end…

Cited by 5Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2024

Enabling Large-scale Heterogeneous Collaboration with Opportunistic Communications

Fernando Cladera, Zachary Ravichandran, Ian D. Miller, M. Ani Hsieh, C. J. Taylor, Vijay Kumar
ICRA 2024poster

Multi-robot collaboration in large-scale environments with limited-sized teams and without external infrastructure is challenging, since the software framework required to support complex tasks must be robust to unreliable and intermittent communication links. In this work, we present MOCHA (Multi-r…

Cited by 7Source ↗Scholar ↗
2024

Learning Local Urban Wind Flow Fields From Range Sensing

Spencer Folk, John Melton, Benjamin W. L. Margolis, Mark Yim, Vijay Kumar
RA-L 2024

Obtaining accurate and timely predictions of the wind through an urban environment is a challenging task, but has wide-ranging implications for the safety and efficiency of autonomous aerial vehicles in future urban airspaces. Prior work relies strongly on global information about the environment, s

Cited by 8Source ↗Scholar ↗
2024

Learning to Explore Indoor Environments using Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles

Yuezhan Tao, Eran Iceland, Beiming Li, Elchanan Zwecher, Uri Heinemann, Avraham Cohen +4
ICRA 2024poster

In this paper, we address the challenge of exploring unknown indoor environments using autonomous aerial robots with Size Weight and Power (SWaP) constraints. The SWaP constraints induce limits on mission time requiring efficiency in exploration. We present a novel exploration framework that uses De…

Cited by 9Source ↗Scholar ↗
2024

Monocular Event-Based Vision for Obstacle Avoidance with a Quadrotor

Anish Bhattacharya, Marco Cannici, Nishanth Rao, Yuezhan Tao, Vijay Kumar, Nikolai Matni +1
CoRL 2024poster

We present the first static-obstacle avoidance method for quadrotors using just an onboard, monocular event camera. Quadrotors are capable of fast and agile flight in cluttered environments when piloted manually, but vision-based autonomous flight in unknown environments is difficult in part due to…

Cited by 5Source ↗Scholar ↗
2024

TOPPQuad: Dynamically-Feasible Time-Optimal Path Parametrization for Quadrotors

Katherine Mao, Igor Spasojevic, M. Ani Hsieh, Vijay Kumar
IROS 2024

Planning time-optimal trajectories for quadrotors in cluttered environments is a challenging, non-convex problem. This paper addresses minimizing the traversal time of a given collision-free geometric path without violating actuation bounds of the vehicle. Previous approaches have either relied on c

Cited by 5Source ↗Scholar ↗
2024

Trajectory Optimization with Global Yaw Parameterization for Field-of-View Constrained Autonomous Flight

Yuwei Wu, Yuezhan Tao, Igor Spasojevic, Vijay Kumar
IROS 2024poster

Trajectory generation for quadrotors with limited field-of-view sensors has numerous applications such as aerial exploration, coverage, inspection, videography, and target tracking. Most previous works simplify the task of optimizing yaw trajectories by either aligning the heading of the robot with…

Cited by 3Source ↗Scholar ↗
2024

TreeScope: An Agricultural Robotics Dataset for LiDAR-Based Mapping of Trees in Forests and Orchards

Derek Cheng, Fernando Cladera, Ankit Prabhu, Xu Liu, Alan Zhu, P. Corey Green +3
ICRA 2024poster

Data collection for forestry, timber, and agriculture relies on manual techniques which are labor-intensive and time-consuming. We seek to demonstrate that robotics offers improvements over these techniques and can accelerate agricultural research, beginning with semantic segmentation and diameter e…

Cited by 11Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2023

A Data-Driven Approach to Synthesizing Dynamics-Aware Trajectories for Underactuated Robotic Systems

Anusha Srikanthan, Fengjun Yang, Igor Spasojevic, Dinesh Thakur, Vijay Kumar, Nikolai Matni
IROS 2023poster

We consider joint trajectory generation and tracking control for under-actuated robotic systems. A common solution is to use a layered control architecture, where the top layer uses a simplified model of system dynamics for trajectory generation, and the low layer ensures approximate tracking of thi…

Cited by 6Source ↗Scholar ↗
2023

Active Collaborative Localization in Heterogeneous Robot Teams

Igor Spasojevic, Xu Liu, Alejandro Ribeiro, George J. Pappas, Vijay Kumar
RSS 2023poster

Accurate and robust state estimation is critical for autonomous navigation of robot teams. This task is especially challenging for large groups of size, weight, and power (SWAP) constrained aerial robots operating in perceptually-degraded GPS-denied environments. We can, however, actively increase t…

Cited by 8Source ↗PDF ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2023

Active Metric-Semantic Mapping by Multiple Aerial Robots

Xu Liu, Ankit Prabhu, Fernando Cladera, Ian D. Miller, Lifeng Zhou, Camillo J. Taylor +1
ICRA 2023poster

Traditional approaches for active mapping focus on building geometric maps. For most real-world applications, however, actionable information is related to semantically meaningful objects in the environment. We propose an approach to the active metric-semantic mapping problem that enables multiple h…

Cited by 24Source ↗Scholar ↗
2023

Multi-Robot Coordination and Cooperation with Task Precedence Relationships

Walker Gosrich, Siddharth Mayya, Saaketh Narayan, Matthew Malencia, Saurav Agarwal, Vijay Kumar
ICRA 2023poster

We propose a new formulation for the multi-robot task planning and allocation problem that incorporates (a) precedence relationships between tasks; (b) coordination for tasks allowing multiple robots to achieve increased efficiency; and (c) cooperation through the formation of robot coalitions for t…

Cited by 14Source ↗Scholar ↗
2023

Robust Localization of Aerial Vehicles via Active Control of Identical Ground Vehicles

Igor Spasojevic, Xu Liu, Ankit Prabhu, Alejandro Ribeiro, George J. Pappas, Vijay Kumar
IROS 2023poster

This paper addresses the problem of active collaborative localization in heterogeneous robot teams with unknown data association. It involves positioning a small number of identical unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) at desired positions so that an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can, through unlabelled…

Cited by 4Source ↗Scholar ↗
2023

SEER: Safe Efficient Exploration for Aerial Robots using Learning to Predict Information Gain

Yuezhan Tao, Yuwei Wu, Beiming Li, Fernando Cladera, Alex Zhou, Dinesh Thakur +1
ICRA 2023poster

We address the problem of efficient 3-D exploration in indoor environments for micro aerial vehicles with limited sensing capabilities and payload/power constraints. We develop an indoor exploration framework that uses learning to predict the occupancy of unseen areas, extracts semantic features, sa…

Cited by 46Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2023

The Role of Symmetry in Constructing Geometric Flat Outputs for Free-Flying Robotic Systems

Jake Welde, Matthew D. Kvalheim, Vijay Kumar
ICRA 2023poster

Mechanical systems naturally evolve on principal bundles describing their inherent symmetries. The ensuing factorization of the configuration manifold into a symmetry group and an internal shape space has provided deep insights into the locomotion of many robotic and biological systems. On the other…

Cited by 11Source ↗Scholar ↗
2023

Trajectory Planning for the Bidirectional Quadrotor as a Differentially Flat Hybrid System

Katherine Mao, Jake Welde, M. Ani Hsieh, Vijay Kumar
ICRA 2023poster

The use of bidirectional propellers provides quadrotors with greater maneuverability which is advantageous in constrained environments. This paper addresses the development of a trajectory planning algorithm for quadrotors with bidirectional motors. Previous work has shown that the property of diffe…

Cited by 4Source ↗Scholar ↗
2022

Adaptive Sampling of Latent Phenomena using Heterogeneous Robot Teams (ASLaP-HR)

Matthew Malencia, Sandeep Manjanna, M. Ani Hsieh, George Pappas, Vijay Kumar
IROS 2022poster

In this paper, we present an online adaptive planning strategy for a team of robots with heterogeneous sensors to sample from a latent spatial field using a learned model for decision making. Current robotic sampling methods seek to gather information about an observable spatial field. However, many…

Cited by 11Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2022

Adaptive and Risk-Aware Target Tracking for Robot Teams With Heterogeneous Sensors

Siddharth Mayya, Ragesh K. Ramachandran, Lifeng Zhou, Vinay Senthil, Dinesh Thakur, Gaurav S. Sukhatme +1
RA-L 2022

We consider a scenario where a team of robots with heterogeneous sensors must track a set of targets or hazards which may induce sensory failures on the robots. In particular, the likelihood of failures depends on the proximity between the targets and the robots. We propose a control framework that

Cited by 25Source ↗Scholar ↗
2022

Coverage Control in Multi-Robot Systems via Graph Neural Networks

Walker Gosrich, Siddharth Mayya, Rebecca Li, James Paulos, Mark Yim, Alejandro Ribeiro +1
ICRA 2022poster

This paper develops a decentralized approach to mobile sensor coverage by a multi-robot system. We consider a scenario where a team of robots with limited sensing range must position itself to effectively detect events of interest in a region characterized by areas of varying importance. Towards thi…

Cited by 40Source ↗Scholar ↗
2022

Experiments in Adaptive Replanning for Fast Autonomous Flight in Forests

Laura Jarin-Lipschitz, Xu Liu, Yuezhan Tao, Vijay Kumar
ICRA 2022poster

Fast, autonomous flight in unstructured, cluttered environments such as forests is challenging because it requires the robot to compute new plans in realtime on a computationally-constrained platform. In this paper, we enable this capability with a search-based planning framework that adapts samplin…

Cited by 20Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2022

Large-Scale Autonomous Flight With Real-Time Semantic SLAM Under Dense Forest Canopy

Xu Liu, Guilherme V. Nardari, Fernando Cladera Ojeda, Yuezhan Tao, Alex Zhou, Thomas Donnelly +5
RA-L 2022

Semantic maps represent the environment using a set of semantically meaningful objects. This representation is storage-efficient, less ambiguous, and more informative, thus facilitating large-scale autonomy and the acquisition of actionable information in highly unstructured, GPS-denied environments

Cited by 99Source ↗Scholar ↗
2022

Robust Semantic Mapping and Localization on a Free-Flying Robot in Microgravity

Ian D. Miller, Ryan Soussan, Brian Coltin, Trey Smith, Vijay Kumar
ICRA 2022poster

We propose a system that uses semantic object detections to localize a microgravity free-flyer. Many applications require absolute localization in a known reference frame, such as the execution of waypoint trajectories defined by human operators. Classical geometric methods build a map of point feat…

Cited by 7Source ↗Scholar ↗
2022

Stronger Together: Air-Ground Robotic Collaboration Using Semantics

Ian D. Miller, Fernando Cladera Ojeda, Trey Smith, Camillo Jose Taylor, Vijay Kumar
RA-L 2022

In this work, we present an end-to-end heterogeneous multi-robot system framework where ground robots are able to localize, plan, and navigate in a semantic map created in real time by a high-altitude quadrotor. The ground robots choose and deconflict their targets independently, without any externa

Cited by 54Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2021

Any Way You Look at It: Semantic Crossview Localization and Mapping With LiDAR

Ian D. Miller, Anthony Cowley, Ravi Konkimalla, Shreyas S. Shivakumar, Ty Nguyen, Trey Smith +2
RA-L 2021

Currently, GPS is by far the most popular global localization method. However, it is not always reliable or accurate in all environments. SLAM methods enable local state estimation but provide no means of registering the local map to a global one, which can be important for inter-robot collaboration

Cited by 43Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2021

Combined Routing and Scheduling of Heterogeneous Transport and Service Agents

Saaketh Narayan, James Paulos, Steven W. Chen, Sandeep Manjanna, Vijay Kumar
IROS 2021poster

This paper investigates servicing waypoints in a wide area using collaborative deployments of vehicles with heterogeneous range and mobility constraints. We formulate a joint planning problem for a single transport truck and multiple service drones in which the truck is constrained to a road and mus…

Cited by 3Source ↗Scholar ↗
2021

Dispersion-Minimizing Motion Primitives for Search-Based Motion Planning

Laura Jarin-Lipschitz, James Paulos, Raymond Bjorkman, Vijay Kumar
ICRA 2021poster

Search-based planning with motion primitives is a powerful motion planning technique that can provide dynamic feasibility, optimality, and real-time computation times on size, weight, and power-constrained platforms in unstructured environments. However, optimal design of the motion planning graph,…

Cited by 17Source ↗Scholar ↗
2021

Large Scale Distributed Collaborative Unlabeled Motion Planning With Graph Policy Gradients

Arbaaz Khan, Vijay Kumar, Alejandro Ribeiro
RA-L 2021

In this letter, we present a learning method to solve the unlabelled motion problem with motion constraints and space constraints in 2D space for a large number of robots. To solve the problem of arbitrary dynamics and constraints we propose formulating the problem as a multi-agent problem. We are a

Cited by 16Source ↗Scholar ↗
2021

Learning Connectivity for Data Distribution in Robot Teams

Ekaterina Tolstaya, Landon Butler, Daniel Mox, James Paulos, Vijay Kumar, Alejandro Ribeiro
IROS 2021poster

Many algorithms for control of multi-robot teams operate under the assumption that low-latency, global state information necessary to coordinate agent actions can readily be disseminated among the team. However, in harsh environments with no existing communication infrastructure, robots must form ad…

Cited by 12Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2021

Multi-Robot Coverage and Exploration using Spatial Graph Neural Networks

Ekaterina Tolstaya, James Paulos, Vijay Kumar, Alejandro Ribeiro
IROS 2021poster

The multi-robot coverage problem is an essential building block for systems that perform tasks like inspection, exploration, or search and rescue. We discretize the coverage problem to induce a spatial graph of locations and represent robots as nodes in the graph. Then, we train a Graph Neural Netwo…

Cited by 79Source ↗Scholar ↗
2021

PennSyn2Real: Training Object Recognition Models Without Human Labeling

Ty Nguyen, Ian D. Miller, Avi Cohen, Dinesh Thakur, Arjun Guru, Shashank Prasad +3
RA-L 2021

Scalable training data generation is a critical problem in deep learning. We propose PennSyn2Real - a photo-realistic synthetic dataset consisting of more than 100 000 4K images of more than 20 types of micro aerial vehicles (MAVs). The dataset can be used to generate arbitrary numbers of training i

Cited by 8Source ↗Scholar ↗
2021

Place Recognition in Forests With Urquhart Tessellations

Guilherme V. Nardari, Avraham Cohen, Steven W. Chen, Xu Liu, Vaibhav Arcot, Roseli A. F. Romero +1
RA-L 2021

In this letter, we present a novel descriptor based on Urquhart tessellations derived from the position of trees in a forest. We propose a framework that uses these descriptors to detect previously seen observations and landmark correspondences, even with partial overlap and noise. We run loop closu

Cited by 19Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2021

ROS-NetSim: A Framework for the Integration of Robotic and Network Simulators

Miguel Calvo-Fullana, Daniel Mox, Alexander Pyattaev, Jonathan Fink, Vijay Kumar, Alejandro Ribeiro
RA-L 2021

Multi-agent systems play an important role in modern robotics. Due to the nature of these systems, coordination among agents via communication is frequently necessary. Indeed, Perception-Action-Communication (PAC) loops, or Perception-Action loops closed over a communication channel, are a critical

Cited by 37Source ↗Scholar ↗
2021

Resilient Task Allocation in Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Systems

Siddharth Mayya, Diego F. Salazar-D'Antonio, David Saldaña, Vijay Kumar
RA-L 2021

This letter presents a resilient mechanism to allocate heterogeneous robots to tasks under difficult environmental conditions such as weather events or adversarial attacks. Our primary objective is to ensure that each task is assigned the requisite level of resources, measured as the aggregated capa

Cited by 75Source ↗Scholar ↗
2020

Adaptive Partitioning for Coordinated Multi-agent Perimeter Defense

Douglas G. Macharet, Austin K. Chen, Daigo Shishika, George J. Pappas, Vijay Kumar
IROS 2020poster

Multi-Robot Systems have been recently employed in different applications and have advantages over single-robot systems, such as increased robustness and task performance efficiency. We consider such assemblies specifically in the scenario of perimeter defense, where the task is to defend a circular…

Cited by 32Source ↗Scholar ↗
2020

DC-CAPT: Concurrent Assignment and Planning of Trajectories for Dubins Cars

Michael Whitzer, Daigo Shishika, Dinesh Thakur, Vijay Kumar, Amanda Prorok
ICRA 2020poster

We present an algorithm for the concurrent assignment and planning of collision-free trajectories (DC-CAPT) for robots whose kinematics can be modeled as Dubins cars, i.e., robots constrained in terms of their initial orientation and their minimum turning radius. Coupling the assignment and trajecto…

Cited by 3Source ↗Scholar ↗
2020

Experimental Evaluation and Characterization of Radioactive Source Effects on Robot Visual Localization and Mapping

Elijah S. Lee, Giuseppe Loianno, Dinesh Thakur, Vijay Kumar
RA-L 2020

Robots are ideally suited to performing simple tasks in dangerous environments. In this letter, we address the use of robots for inspection of nuclear reactors which may be contaminated by radiation. The geometry of a reactor vessel is three-dimensional with significant clutter. Accordingly, we prop

Cited by 15Source ↗Scholar ↗
2020

Feedback Enhanced Motion Planning for Autonomous Vehicles

Ke Sun, Brent Schlotfeldt, Stephen Chaves, Paul Martin, Gulshan Mandhyan, Vijay Kumar
IROS 2020poster

In this work, we address the motion planning problem for autonomous vehicles through a new lattice planning approach, called Feedback Enhanced Lattice Planner (FELP). Existing lattice planners have two major limitations, namely the high dimensionality of the lattice and the lack of modeling of agent…

Cited by 10Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2020

Game Theoretic Formation Design for Probabilistic Barrier Coverage

Daigo Shishika, Douglas G. Macharet, Brian M. Sadler, Vijay Kumar
IROS 2020poster

We study strategies to deploy defenders/sensors to detect intruders that approach a targeted region. This scenario is formulated as a barrier coverage, which aims to minimize the number of unseen paths. The problem becomes challenging when the number of defenders is insufficient for a full coverage,…

Cited by 7Source ↗Scholar ↗
2020

IMU-Based Inertia Estimation for a Quadrotor Using Newton-Euler Dynamics

James Svacha, James Paulos, Giuseppe Loianno, Vijay Kumar
RA-L 2020

In this letter, we demonstrate that a quadrotor's tilt, angular velocity, linear velocity and the parameters shown in Table II may be estimated using only an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and motor speed feedback for sensing. Motor speed commands are used to drive the process model and the motor s

Cited by 52Source ↗Scholar ↗
2020

Information Theoretic Active Exploration in Signed Distance Fields

Kelsey Saulnier, Nikolay Atanasov, George J. Pappas, Vijay Kumar
ICRA 2020poster

This paper focuses on exploration and occupancy mapping of unknown environments using a mobile robot. While a truncated signed distance field (TSDF) is a popular, efficient, and highly accurate representation of occupancy, few works have considered optimizing robot sensing trajectories for autonomou…

Cited by 37Source ↗Scholar ↗
2020

Mine Tunnel Exploration Using Multiple Quadrupedal Robots

Ian D. Miller, Avraham Cohen, Adarsh Kulkarni, James Laney, Camillo Jose Taylor, Vijay Kumar +8
RA-L 2020

Robotic exploration of underground environments is a particularly challenging problem due to communication, endurance, and traversability constraints which necessitate high degrees of autonomy and agility. These challenges are further exacerbated by the need to minimize human intervention for practi

Cited by 108Source ↗Scholar ↗
2020

Mobile Wireless Network Infrastructure on Demand

Daniel Mox, Miguel Calvo-Fullana, Mikhail Gerasimenko, Jonathan Fink, Vijay Kumar, Alejandro Ribeiro
ICRA 2020poster

In this work, we introduce Mobile Wireless Infrastructure on Demand: a framework for providing wireless connectivity to multi-robot teams via autonomously reconfiguring ad-hoc networks. In many cases, previous multi-agent systems either assumed the availability of existing communication infrastructu…

Cited by 26Source ↗Scholar ↗
2020

Neurosymbolic Transformers for Multi-Agent Communication

Jeevana Priya Inala, Yichen Yang, James Paulos, Yewen Pu, Osbert Bastani, Vijay Kumar +2
NeurIPS 2020poster

We study the problem of inferring communication structures that can solve cooperative multi-agent planning problems while minimizing the amount of communication. We quantify the amount of communication as the maximum degree of the communication graph; this metric captures settings where agents have…

Cited by 37Source ↗PDF ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2020

PST900: RGB-Thermal Calibration, Dataset and Segmentation Network

Shreyas S. Shivakumar, Neil Rodrigues, Alex Zhou, Ian D. Miller, Vijay Kumar, Camillo J. Taylor
ICRA 2020poster

In this work we propose long wave infrared (LWIR) imagery as a viable supporting modality for semantic segmentation using learning-based techniques. We first address the problem of RGB-thermal camera calibration by proposing a passive calibration target and procedure that is both portable and easy t…

Cited by 241Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2020

Reactive Temporal Logic Planning for Multiple Robots in Unknown Environments

Yiannis Kantaros, Matthew Malencia, Vijay Kumar, George J. Pappas
ICRA 2020poster

This paper proposes a new reactive mission planning algorithm for multiple robots that operate in unknown environments. The robots are equipped with individual sensors that allow them to collectively learn and continuously update a map of the unknown environment. The goal of the robots is to accompl…

Cited by 46Source ↗Scholar ↗
2020

Robust, Perception Based Control with Quadrotors

Laura Jarin-Lipschitz, Rebecca Li, Ty Nguyen, Vijay Kumar, Nikolai Matni
IROS 2020poster

Traditionally, controllers and state estimators in robotic systems are designed independently. Controllers are often designed assuming perfect state estimation. However, state estimation methods such as Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) drift over time and can cause the system to misbehave. While state…

Cited by 12Source ↗Scholar ↗
2020

SLOAM: Semantic Lidar Odometry and Mapping for Forest Inventory

Steven W. Chen, Guilherme V. Nardari, Elijah S. Lee, Chao Qu, Xu Liu, Roseli A. Francelin Romero +1
RA-L 2020

This letter describes an end-to-end pipeline for tree diameter estimation based on semantic segmentation and lidar odometry and mapping. Accurate mapping of this type of environment is challenging since the ground and the trees are surrounded by leaves, thorns and vines, and the sensor typically exp

Cited by 165Source ↗Scholar ↗
2020

Self-Reconfiguration in Response to Faults in Modular Aerial Systems

Neeraj Gandhi, David Saldaña, Vijay Kumar, Linh Thi Xuan Phan
RA-L 2020

We present a self-reconfiguration technique by which a modular Hying platform can mitigate the impact of rotor failures. In this technique, the system adapts its configuration in response to rotor failures to be able to continue its mission while efficiently utilizing resources. A mixed integer line

Cited by 23Source ↗Scholar ↗
2020

TLIO: Tight Learned Inertial Odometry

Wenxin Liu, David Caruso, Eddy Ilg, Jing Dong, Anastasios I. Mourikis, Kostas Daniilidis +2
RA-L 2020

In this letter we propose a tightly-coupled Extended Kalman Filter framework for IMU-only state estimation. Strap-down IMU measurements provide relative state estimates based on IMU kinematic motion model. However the integration of measurements is sensitive to sensor bias and noise, causing signifi

Cited by 241Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2020

The Tiercel: A novel autonomous micro aerial vehicle that can map the environment by flying into obstacles

Yash Mulgaonkar, Wenxin Liu, Dinesh Thakur, Kostas Daniilidis, Camillo J. Taylor, Vijay Kumar
ICRA 2020poster

Autonomous flight through unknown environments in the presence of obstacles is a challenging problem for micro aerial vehicles (MAVs). A majority of the current state-of-art research assumes obstacles as opaque objects that can be easily sensed by optical sensors such as cameras or LiDARs. However i…

Cited by 32Source ↗Scholar ↗
2020

Vision-based Multi-MAV Localization with Anonymous Relative Measurements Using Coupled Probabilistic Data Association Filter

Ty Nguyen, Kartik Mohta, Camillo J. Taylor, Vijay Kumar
ICRA 2020poster

We address the localization of robots in a multi-MAV system where external infrastructure like GPS or motion capture systems may not be available. Our approach lends itself to implementation on platforms with several constraints on size, weight, and power (SWaP). Particularly, our framework fuses th…

Cited by 48Source ↗Scholar ↗
2019

A Theoretically Sound Upper Bound on the Triplet Loss for Improving the Efficiency of Deep Distance Metric Learning

Thanh-Toan Do, Toan Tran, Ian Reid, Vijay Kumar, Tuan Hoang, Gustavo Carneiro
CVPR 2019poster

We propose a method that substantially improves the efficiency of deep distance metric learning based on the optimization of the triplet loss function. One epoch of such training process based on a na"ive optimization of the triplet loss function has a run-time complexity O(N^3), where N is the numb…

Cited by 77PDF ↗Scholar ↗
2019

Analysis of Ground Effect for Small-Scale UAVs in Forward Flight

Xinyue Kan, Justin Thomas, Hanzhe Teng, Herbert G. Tanner, Vijay Kumar, Konstantinos Karydis
RA-L 2019

The letter investigates how the behavior of small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is influenced by the system's close proximity to the ground/rigid surfaces both at hover and in forward flight. We perform an extensive experimental study where a quadrotor is tasked with flying in forward veloci

Cited by 61Source ↗Scholar ↗
2019

Autonomous Precision Pouring From Unknown Containers

Monroe Kennedy, Karl Schmeckpeper, Dinesh Thakur, Chenfanfu Jiang, Vijay Kumar, Kostas Daniilidis
RA-L 2019

We autonomously pour from unknown symmetric containers found in a typical wet laboratory for the development of a robot-assisted, rapid experiment preparation system. The robot estimates the pouring container symmetric geometry, then leverages simulated pours as priors for a given fluid to pour prec

Cited by 46Source ↗Scholar ↗
2019

Decentralization of Multiagent Policies by Learning What to Communicate

James Paulos, Steven W. Chen, Daigo Shishika, Vijay Kumar
ICRA 2019poster

Effective communication is required for teams of robots to solve sophisticated collaborative tasks. In practice it is typical for both the encoding and semantics of communication to be manually defined by an expert; this is true regardless of whether the behaviors themselves are bespoke, optimizatio…

Cited by 36Source ↗Scholar ↗
2019

Graph Policy Gradients for Large Scale Robot Control

Arbaaz Khan, Ekaterina Tolstaya, Alejandro Ribeiro, Vijay Kumar
CoRL 2019

In this paper, the problem of learning policies to control a large number of homogeneous robots is considered. To this end, we propose a new algorithm we call Graph Policy Gradients (GPG) that exploits the underlying graph symmetry among the robots. The curse of dimensionality one encounters when wo

Cited by 0Source ↗PDF ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2019

Inertial Yaw-Independent Velocity and Attitude Estimation for High-Speed Quadrotor Flight

James Svacha, Giuseppe Loianno, Vijay Kumar
RA-L 2019

This letter addresses the velocity and attitude estimation of a quadrotor using motor speeds and inertial measurement unit (IMU) data. This result is obtained through a novel filter that employs a first-order drag model, which allows the velocity to be observed through the drag forces acting on the

Cited by 22Source ↗Scholar ↗
2019

Inverse Optimal Planning for Air Traffic Control

Ekaterina Tolstaya, Alejandro Ribeiro, Vijay Kumar, Ashish Kapoor
IROS 2019poster

We envision a system that concisely describes the rules of air traffic control, assists human operators and supports dense autonomous air traffic around commercial airports. We develop a method to learn the rules of air traffic control from real data as a cost function via maximum entropy inverse re…

Cited by 8Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2019

Learning Decentralized Controllers for Robot Swarms with Graph Neural Networks

Ekaterina Tolstaya, Fernando Gama, James Paulos, George Pappas, Vijay Kumar, Alejandro Ribeiro
CoRL 2019

We consider the problem of finding distributed controllers for large networks of mobile robots with interacting dynamics and sparsely available communications. Our approach is to learn local controllers that require only local information and communications at test time by imitating the policy of ce

Cited by 0Source ↗PDF ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2019

Learning Safe Unlabeled Multi-Robot Planning with Motion Constraints

Arbaaz Khan, Chi Zhang, Shuo Li, Jiayue Wu, Brent Schlotfeldt, Sarah Y. Tang +3
IROS 2019poster

In this paper, we present a learning approach to goal assignment and trajectory planning for unlabeled robots operating in 2D, obstacle-filled workspaces. More specifically, we tackle the unlabeled multi-robot motion planning problem with motion constraints as a multi-agent reinforcement learning pr…

Cited by 41Source ↗Scholar ↗
2019

MAVNet: An Effective Semantic Segmentation Micro-Network for MAV-Based Tasks

Ty Nguyen, Shreyas S. Shivakumar, Ian D. Miller, James Keller, Elijah S. Lee, Alex Zhou +6
RA-L 2019

Real-time semantic image segmentation on platforms subject to size, weight, and power constraints is a key area of interest for air surveillance and inspection. In this letter, we propose MAVNet: a small, light-weight, deep neural network for real-time semantic segmentation on micro aerial vehicles

Cited by 38Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2019

ModQuad-Vi: A Vision-Based Self-Assembling Modular Quadrotor

Guanrui Li, Bruno Gabrich, David Saldaña, Jnaneshwar Das, Vijay Kumar, Mark Yim
ICRA 2019poster

Flying modular robots have the potential to rapidly form temporary structures. In the literature, docking actions rely on external systems and indoor infrastructures for relative pose estimation. In contrast to related work, we provide local estimation during the self-assembly process to avoid depen…

Cited by 53Source ↗Scholar ↗
2019

Monocular Camera Based Fruit Counting and Mapping With Semantic Data Association

Xu Liu, Steven W. Chen, Chenhao Liu, Shreyas S. Shivakumar, Jnaneshwar Das, Camillo J. Taylor +2
RA-L 2019

In this letter, we present a cheap, lightweight, and fast fruit counting pipeline. Our pipeline relies only on a monocular camera, and achieves counting performance comparable to a state-of-the-art fruit counting system that utilizes an expensive sensor suite including a monocular camera, LiDAR and

Cited by 81Source ↗Scholar ↗
2019

Nanoliter Fluid Handling for Microbiology Via Levitated Magnetic Microrobots

Elizabeth E. Hunter, Edward B. Steager, Allen Hsu, Annjoe Wong-Foy, Ron Pelrine, Vijay Kumar
RA-L 2019

Microbiological environments are a clear application area for microscale robotics, but targeted delivery of biochemical cues to particular cells or tissues remains a significant challenge. This challenge is compounded by the sheer number of cells that compose tissues. Multirobot system development h

Cited by 19Source ↗Scholar ↗
2019

Online Estimation of Geometric and Inertia Parameters for Multirotor Aerial Vehicles

Valentin Wüest, Vijay Kumar, Giuseppe Loianno
ICRA 2019poster

Accurate knowledge of geometric and inertia parameters are a necessity for precise and robust control of aerial vehicles. We propose a novel filter that is able to fuse motor speed, inertia, and pose measurements to estimate the vehicle's key dynamic properties online. The presented framework is abl…

Cited by 43Source ↗Scholar ↗
2019

Real Time Dense Depth Estimation by Fusing Stereo with Sparse Depth Measurements

Shreyas S. Shivakumar, Kartik Mohta, Bernd Pfrommer, Vijay Kumar, Camillo J. Taylor
ICRA 2019poster

We present an approach to depth estimation that fuses information from a stereo pair with sparse range measurements derived from a LIDAR sensor or a range camera. The goal of this work is to exploit the complementary strengths of the two sensor modalities, the accurate but sparse range measurements…

Cited by 27Source ↗Scholar ↗
2019

The Open Vision Computer: An Integrated Sensing and Compute System for Mobile Robots

Morgan Quigley, Kartik Mohta, Shreyas S. Shivakumar, Michael Watterson, Yash Mulgaonkar, Mikael Arguedas +5
ICRA 2019poster

In this paper we describe the Open Vision Computer (OVC) which was designed to support high speed, vision guided autonomous drone flight. In particular our aim was to develop a system that would be suitable for relatively small-scale flying platforms where size, weight, power consumption and computa…

Cited by 40Source ↗Scholar ↗
2018

Anytime Planning for Decentralized Multirobot Active Information Gathering

Brent Schlotfeldt, Dinesh Thakur, Nikolay Atanasov, Vijay Kumar, George J. Pappas
RA-L 2018

This letter considers the problem of reducing uncertainty about a physical process of interest by designing sensing trajectories for a team of robots. This active information gathering problem has applications in environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and security and surveillance. Our previou

Cited by 126Source ↗Scholar ↗
2018

Experiments in Fast, Autonomous, GPS-Denied Quadrotor Flight

Kartik Mohta, Ke Sun, Sikang Liu, Michael Watterson, Bernd Pfrommer, James Svacha +3
ICRA 2018poster

High speed navigation through unknown environments is a challenging problem in robotics. It requires fast computation and tight integration of all the subsystems on the robot such that the latency in the perception-action loop is as small as possible. Aerial robots add a limitation of payload capaci…

Cited by 61Source ↗Scholar ↗
2018

Inertial Velocity and Attitude Estimation for Quadrotors

James Svacha, Kartik Mohta, Michael Watterson, Giuseppe Loianno, Vijay Kumar
IROS 2018poster

This work addresses the design and implementation of a filter that estimates the orientation of the body-fixed z axis and the velocity of a quadrotor UAV from the inertial measurement unit (IMU) given a known yaw. The velocity and attitude estimation is possible since the filter employs a linear dra…

Cited by 20Source ↗Scholar ↗
2018

Localization, Grasping, and Transportation of Magnetic Objects by a Team of MAVs in Challenging Desert-Like Environments

Giuseppe Loianno, Vojtech Spurný, Justin Thomas, Tomás Báca, Dinesh Thakur, Daniel Hert +6
RA-L 2018

Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have the potential to assist in real-life tasks involving grasping and transportation, but not before solving several difficult research challenges. In this work, we address the design, control, estimation, and planning problems for cooperative localization, g

Cited by 102Source ↗Scholar ↗
2018

Memory Augmented Control Networks

Arbaaz Khan, Clark Zhang, Nikolay Atanasov, Konstantinos Karydis, Vijay Kumar, Daniel D. Lee
ICLR 2018poster

Planning problems in partially observable environments cannot be solved directly with convolutional networks and require some form of memory. But, even memory networks with sophisticated addressing schemes are unable to learn intelligent reasoning satisfactorily due to the complexity of simultaneous…

Cited by 98Source ↗PDF ↗Scholar ↗
2018

ModQuad: The Flying Modular Structure that Self-Assembles in Midair

David Saldaña, Bruno Gabrich, Guanrui Li, Mark Yim, Vijay Kumar
ICRA 2018poster

We introduce ModQuad, a novel flying modular robotic structure that is able to self-assemble in midair and cooperatively fly. The structure is composed by agile flying modules that can easily move in a three dimensional environment. The module is based on a quadrotor platform within a cuboid frame w…

Cited by 160Source ↗Scholar ↗
2018

Model Predictive Trajectory Tracking and Collision Avoidance for Reliable Outdoor Deployment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Tomas Baca, Daniel Hert, Giuseppe Loianno, Martin Saska, Vijay Kumar
IROS 2018poster

We propose a novel approach for optimal trajectory tracking for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), using a linear model predictive controller (MPC) in combination with non-linear state feedback. The solution relies on fast onboard simulation of the translational dynamics of the UAV, which is guided by…

Cited by 200Source ↗Scholar ↗
2018

Robust Fruit Counting: Combining Deep Learning, Tracking, and Structure from Motion

Xu Liu, Steven W. Chen, Shreyas Aditya, Nivedha Sivakumar, Sandeep Dcunha, Chao Qu +3
IROS 2018poster

We present a novel fruit counting pipeline that combines deep segmentation, frame to frame tracking, and 3D localization to accurately count visible fruits across a sequence of images. Our pipeline works on image streams from a monocular camera, both in natural light, as well as with controlled illu…

Cited by 157Source ↗Scholar ↗
2018

Robust Stereo Visual Inertial Odometry for Fast Autonomous Flight

Ke Sun, Kartik Mohta, Bernd Pfrommer, Michael Watterson, Sikang Liu, Yash Mulgaonkar +2
RA-L 2018

In recent years, vision-aided inertial odometry for state estimation has matured significantly. However, we still encounter challenges in terms of improving the computational efficiency and robustness of the underlying algorithms for applications in autonomous flight with microaerial vehicles, in wh

Cited by 502Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2018

Semi-Dense Visual-Inertial Odometry and Mapping for Quadrotors with SWAP Constraints

Wenxin Liu, Giuseppe Loianno, Kartik Mohta, Kostas Daniilidis, Vijay Kumar
ICRA 2018poster

Micro Aerial Vehicles have the potential to assist humans in real life tasks involving applications such as smart homes, search and rescue, and architecture construction. To enhance autonomous navigation capabilities these vehicles need to be able to create dense 3D maps of the environment, while co…

Cited by 13Source ↗Scholar ↗
2018

Spatio-Temporally Smooth Local Mapping and State Estimation Inside Generalized Cylinders With Micro Aerial Vehicles

Tolga Özaslan, Giuseppe Loianno, James Keller, Camillo J. Taylor, Vijay Kumar
RA-L 2018

In this letter, we consider state estimation and local mapping with a micro aerial vehicle inside a tunnel that can be modeled as a generalized cylinder, using a three-dimensional lidar and an inertial measurement unit. This axisymmetric environment poses unique challenges in terms of localization a

Cited by 17Source ↗Scholar ↗
2018

The Multivehicle Stereo Event Camera Dataset: An Event Camera Dataset for 3D Perception

Alex Zihao Zhu, Dinesh Thakur, Tolga Özaslan, Bernd Pfrommer, Vijay Kumar, Kostas Daniilidis
RA-L 2018

Event-based cameras are a new passive sensing modality with a number of benefits over traditional cameras, including extremely low latency, asynchronous data acquisition, high dynamic range, and very low power consumption. There has been a lot of recent interest and development in applying algorithm

Cited by 583Source ↗Scholar ↗
2018

Toward Soft Micro Bio Robots for Cellular and Chemical Delivery

Elizabeth E. Hunter, Evan W. Brink, Edward B. Steager, Vijay Kumar
RA-L 2018

A major driving force propelling the evolution of micrometer and millimeter scale robots is their eventual use in biological environments. Many advancements to microscale robotic technologies have shown that these small scale robots are well-suited for use in environments in which cells and cellular

Cited by 35Source ↗Scholar ↗
2018

Trajectory Optimization On Manifolds with Applications to SO(3) and R3XS2

Michael Watterson, Sikang Liu, Ke Sun, Trey Smith, Vijay Kumar
RSS 2018poster

Manifolds are used in almost all robotics applications even if they are not explicitly modeled. We propose a differential geometric approach for optimizing trajectories on a Riemannian manifold with obstacles. The optimization problem depends on a metric and collision function specific to a manifol…

Cited by 35Source ↗PDF ↗Scholar ↗
2018

Unsupervised Deep Homography: A Fast and Robust Homography Estimation Model

Ty Nguyen, Steven W. Chen, Shreyas S. Shivakumar, Camillo Jose Taylor, Vijay Kumar
RA-L 2018

Homography estimation between multiple aerial images can provide relative pose estimation for collaborative autonomous exploration and monitoring. The usage on a robotic system requires a fast and robust homography estimation algorithm. In this letter, we propose an unsupervised learning algorithm t

Cited by 344Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2018

Visual Inertial Odometry Swarm: An Autonomous Swarm of Vision-Based Quadrotors

Aaron Weinstein, Adam Cho, Giuseppe Loianno, Vijay Kumar
RA-L 2018

In this letter, we present the system infrastructure for a swarm of quadrotors, which perform all estimation on board using monocular visual inertial odometry. This is a novel system since it does not require an external motion capture system or GPS and is able to execute formation tasks without int

Cited by 5Source ↗Scholar ↗
2017

A decentralized algorithm for assembling structures with modular robots

David Saldaña, Bruno Gabrich, Michael Whitzer, Amanda Prorok, Mario F. M. Campos, Mark Yim +1
IROS 2017poster

Recent work in the field of bio-inspired robotic systems has introduced designs for modular robots that are able to assemble into structures (e.g., bridges, landing platforms, fences) using their bodies as the building components. Yet, it remains an open question as to how to program large swarms of…

Cited by 36Source ↗Scholar ↗
2017

Autonomous Flight for Detection, Localization, and Tracking of Moving Targets With a Small Quadrotor

Justin Thomas, Jake Welde, Giuseppe Loianno, Kostas Daniilidis, Vijay Kumar
RA-L 2017

In this letter, we address the autonomous flight of a small quadrotor, enabling tracking of a moving object. The 15-cm diameter, 250-g robot relies only on onboard sensors (a single camera and an inertial measurement unit) and computers, and can detect, localize, and track moving objects. Our key co

Cited by 118Source ↗Scholar ↗
2017

Autonomous Navigation and Mapping for Inspection of Penstocks and Tunnels With MAVs

Tolga Özaslan, Giuseppe Loianno, James Keller, Camillo J. Taylor, Vijay Kumar, Jennifer M. Wozencraft +1
RA-L 2017

In this paper, we address the estimation, control, navigation and mapping problems to achieve autonomous inspection of penstocks and tunnels using aerial vehicles with on-board sensing and computation. Penstocks and tunnels have the shape of a generalized cylinder. They are generally dark and featur

Cited by 135Source ↗Scholar ↗
2017

Counting Apples and Oranges With Deep Learning: A Data-Driven Approach

Steven W. Chen, Shreyas S. Shivakumar, Sandeep Dcunha, Jnaneshwar Das, Edidiong Okon, Chao Qu +2
RA-L 2017

This paper describes a fruit counting pipeline based on deep learning that accurately counts fruit in unstructured environments. Obtaining reliable fruit counts is challenging because of variations in appearance due to illumination changes and occlusions from foliage and neighboring fruits. We propo

Cited by 365Source ↗Scholar ↗
2017

Estimation, Control, and Planning for Aggressive Flight With a Small Quadrotor With a Single Camera and IMU

Giuseppe Loianno, Chris Brunner, Gary G. Mcgrath, Vijay Kumar
RA-L 2017

We address the state estimation, control, and planning for aggressive flight with a 150 cm diameter, 250 g quadrotor equipped only with a single camera and an inertial measurement unit (IMU). The use of smartphone grade hardware and the small scale provides an inexpensive and practical solution for

Cited by 289Source ↗Scholar ↗
2017

Intrusion detection for stochastic task allocation in robot swarms

Florian Maushart, Amanda Prorok, M. Ani Hsieh, Vijay Kumar
IROS 2017poster

We present a novel framework for integrity analysis of swarm robotic systems using the symmetric Kullback-Leibler Divergence. The objective is to understand a robot swarm's vulnerability to malicious intrusion and to develop the necessary computational tools that would detect the presence of malicio…

Cited by 6Source ↗Scholar ↗
2017

Planning Dynamically Feasible Trajectories for Quadrotors Using Safe Flight Corridors in 3-D Complex Environments

Sikang Liu, Michael Watterson, Kartik Mohta, Ke Sun, Subhrajit Bhattacharya, Camillo J. Taylor +1
RA-L 2017

There is extensive literature on using convex optimization to derive piece-wise polynomial trajectories for controlling differential flat systems with applications to three-dimensional flight for Micro Aerial Vehicles. In this work, we propose a method to formulate trajectory generation as a quadrat

Cited by 539Source ↗Scholar ↗
2017

Precise dispensing of liquids using visual feedback

Monroe Kennedy, Kendall Queen, Dinesh Thakur, Kostas Daniilidis, Vijay Kumar
IROS 2017poster

Robotic pouring is an important step in improving the safety, productivity and repeatability in the biotechnology industry and generally increasing the effectiveness of robotics in human based environments. In this work we present a method to autonomously dispense a precise amount of fluid using onl…

Cited by 33Source ↗Scholar ↗
2017

Rapid Deployment of Mobile Robots Under Temporal, Performance, Perception, and Resource Constraints

Jose Luis Susa Rincon, Pratap Tokekar, Vijay Kumar, Stefano Carpin
RA-L 2017

We consider the problem where a team of mobile robots is tasked with collecting information about a set of stationary targets. There is a temporal deadline to complete the task, and the objective is to determine a control policy maximizing the probability of successfully completing the task within t

Cited by 7Source ↗Scholar ↗
2017

Search-based motion planning for quadrotors using linear quadratic minimum time control

Sikang Liu, Nikolay Atanasov, Kartik Mohta, Vijay Kumar
IROS 2017poster

In this work, we propose a search-based planning method to compute dynamically feasible trajectories for a quadrotor flying in an obstacle-cluttered environment. Our approach searches for smooth, minimum-time trajectories by exploring the map using a set of short-duration motion primitives. The prim…

Cited by 257Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗
2016

A swarm of flying smartphones

Giuseppe Loianno, Yash Mulgaonkar, Chris Brunner, Dheeraj Ahuja, Arvind Ramanandan, Murali Chari +2
IROS 2016poster

In the last decade, consumer electronic devices such as smartphones, are packaged with small cameras, gyroscopes, and accelerometers, all sensors allowing autonomous deployment of aerial robots in GPS-denied environments. Our previous work [1], demonstrated the feasibility of using smartphones for a…

Cited by 31Source ↗Scholar ↗
2016

Automated Creation of Topological Maps in Unknown Environments Using a Swarm of Resource-Constrained Robots

Rattanachai Ramaithitima, Michael Whitzer, Subhrajit Bhattacharya, Vijay Kumar
RA-L 2016

We address the development of the theory and algorithms that can enable a swarm of inexpensive robots or mobile sensors to create topological maps of unknown environments without explicitly requiring metric information. Topological maps are sparse and faithful representations of environments, and ar

Cited by 35Source ↗Scholar ↗
2016

Online planning for energy-efficient and disturbance-aware UAV operations

Nicola Bezzo, Kartik Mohta, Cameron Nowzari, Insup Lee, Vijay Kumar, George Pappas
IROS 2016poster

In this paper we consider an online planning problem for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operations. Specifically, a UAV has the task of reaching a goal from a set of possible goals while minimizing the amount of energy required. Due to unforeseen disturbances, it is possible that initially attractive…

Cited by 62Source ↗Scholar ↗
2016

The flying monkey: A mesoscale robot that can run, fly, and grasp

Yash Mulgaonkar, Brandon Araki, Je-Sung Koh, Luis Guerrero-Bonilla, Daniel M. Aukes, Anurag Makineni +4
ICRA 2016

The agility and ease of control make a quadrotor aircraft an attractive platform for studying swarm behavior, modeling, and control. The energetics of sustained flight for small aircraft, however, limit typical applications to only a few minutes. Adding payloads - and the mechanisms used to manipula

Cited by 61Source ↗Scholar ↗
2016

Towards autonomous phytopathology: Outcomes and challenges of citrus greening disease detection through close-range remote sensing

Suproteem K. Sarkar, Jnaneshwar Das, Reza Ehsani, Vijay Kumar
ICRA 2016

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have the potential to significantly impact early detection and monitoring of plant diseases. In this paper, we present preliminary work in developing a UAV-mounted sensor suite for detection of citrus greening disease, a major threat to Florida citrus production. We p

Cited by 27Source ↗Scholar ↗
2016

Towards fully autonomous visual inspection of dark featureless dam penstocks using MAVs

Tolga Özaslan, Kartik Mohta, James Keller, Yash Mulgaonkar, Camillo J. Taylor, Vijay Kumar +2
IROS 2016poster

In the last decade, multi-rotor Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have attracted great attention from robotics researchers. Offering affordable agility and maneuverability, multi-rotor aircrafts have become the most commonly used platforms for robotics applications. Amongst the most promising application…

Cited by 47Source ↗Scholar ↗
2016

Visual Servoing of Quadrotors for Perching by Hanging From Cylindrical Objects

Justin Thomas, Giuseppe Loianno, Kostas Daniilidis, Vijay Kumar
RA-L 2016

This letter addresses vision-based localization and servoing for quadrotors to enable autonomous perching by hanging from cylindrical structures using only a monocular camera. We focus on the problems of relative pose estimation, control, and trajectory planning for maneuvering a robot relative to c

Cited by 101Source ↗Scholar ↗
2015

Autonomous robotic exploration using occupancy grid maps and graph SLAM based on Shannon and Rényi Entropy

Henry Carrillo, Philip Dames, Vijay Kumar, José A. Castellanos
ICRA 2015poster

In this paper we examine the problem of autonomously exploring and mapping an environment using a mobile robot. The robot uses a graph-based SLAM system to perform mapping and represents the map as an occupancy grid. In this setting, the robot must trade-off between exploring new area to complete th…

Cited by 125Source ↗Scholar ↗
2015

Comparison of an attitude estimator based on the Lagrange-d'Alembert principle with some state-of-the-art filters

Maziar Izadi, Ehsan Samiei, Amit K. Sanyal, Vijay Kumar
ICRA 2015poster

Discrete-time estimation of rigid body attitude and angular velocity without any knowledge of the attitude dynamics model, is treated using the discrete Lagrange-d'Alembert principle. Using body-fixed sensor measurements of direction vectors and angular velocity, a Lagrangian is obtained as the diff…

Cited by 32Source ↗Scholar ↗
2015

Information-Theoretic Planning with Trajectory Optimization for Dense 3D Mapping

Benjamin Charrow, Gregory Kahn, Sachin Patil, Sikang Liu, Ken Goldberg, Pieter Abbeel +2
RSS 2015poster

We propose an information-theoretic planning approach that enables mobile robots to autonomously construct dense 3D maps in a computationally efficient manner. Inspired by prior work, we accomplish this task by formulating an information-theoretic objective function based on Cauchy-Schwarz quadratic…

Cited by 232Source ↗PDF ↗Scholar ↗
2015

Information-theoretic mapping using Cauchy-Schwarz Quadratic Mutual Information

Benjamin Charrow, Sikang Liu, Vijay Kumar, Nathan Michael
ICRA 2015poster

We develop a computationally efficient control policy for active perception that incorporates explicit models of sensing and mobility to build 3D maps with ground and aerial robots. Like previous work, our policy maximizes an information-theoretic objective function between the discrete occupancy be…

Cited by 211Source ↗Scholar ↗
2015

Mixed Integer Quadratic Program trajectory generation for a quadrotor with a cable-suspended payload

Sarah Tang, Vijay Kumar
ICRA 2015poster

In this paper, we present a trajectory planning method to navigate a quadrotor with a cable-suspended payload through known obstacle-filled environments. We model the system as a hybrid dynamical system and formulate the trajectory generation problem as a Mixed Integer Quadratic Program (MIQP). Spec…

Cited by 228Source ↗Scholar ↗
2015

Sensor coverage robot swarms using local sensing without metric information

Rattanachai Ramaithitima, Michael Whitzer, Subhrajit Bhattacharya, Vijay Kumar
ICRA 2015poster

We consider the problem of deploying a swarm of mobile robots into an unknown environment for attaining complete sensor coverage of the environment. The robots have limited and noisy sensing capabilities and no metric or global information available to them. Using tools from algebraic topology, we f…

Cited by 37Source ↗Scholar ↗
2015

Smartphones power flying robots

Giuseppe Loianno, Yash Mulgaonkar, Chris Brunner, Dheeraj Ahuja, Arvind Ramanandan, Murali Chari +2
IROS 2015poster

Consumer grade technology seen in cameras and phones has led to the price/performance ratio of sensors and processors falling dramatically over the last decade. In particular, most devices are packaged with a camera, a gyroscope, and an accelerometer, important sensors for aerial robotics. The low m…

Cited by 48Source ↗Scholar ↗
2015

Tightly-coupled monocular visual-inertial fusion for autonomous flight of rotorcraft MAVs

Shaojie Shen, Nathan Michael, Vijay Kumar
ICRA 2015poster

There have been increasing interests in the robotics community in building smaller and more agile autonomous micro aerial vehicles (MAVs). In particular, the monocular visual-inertial system (VINS) that consists of only a camera and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) forms a great minimum sensor sui…

Cited by 283Source ↗Scholar ↗