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LiDAR-guided object search and detection in Subterranean Environments
(2022)2022 IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR)Detecting objects of interest, such as human survivors, safety equipment, and structure access points, is critical to any search-and-rescue operation. Robots deployed for such time-sensitive efforts rely on their onboard sensors to perform their designated tasks. However, as disaster response operations are predominantly conducted under perceptually degraded conditions, commonly utilized sensors such as visual cameras and LiDARs suffer ...Conference Paper -
Locomotion Policy Guided Traversability Learning using Volumetric Representations of Complex Environments
(2022)2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)Despite the progress in legged robotic locomotion, autonomous navigation in unknown environments remains an open problem. Ideally, the navigation system utilizes the full potential of the robots' locomotion capabilities while operating within safety limits under uncertainty. The robot must sense and analyze the traversability of the surrounding terrain, which depends on the hardware, locomotion control, and terrain properties. It may ...Conference Paper -
Learning-based Localizability Estimation for Robust LiDAR Localization
(2022)2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)LiDAR-based localization and mapping is one of the core components in many modern robotic systems due to the direct integration of range and geometry, allowing for precise motion estimation and generation of high quality maps in real-time. Yet, as a consequence of insufficient environmental constraints present in the scene, this dependence on geometry can result in localization failure, happening in self-symmetric surroundings such as ...Conference Paper -
Unsupervised Identification and Prediction of Foothold Robustness
(2013)2013 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and AutomationThis paper addresses the problem of evaluating and estimating the mechanical robustness of footholds for legged robots in unstructured terrain. In contrast to approaches that rely on human expert knowledge or human defined criteria to identify appropriate footholds, our method uses the robot itself to assess whether a certain foothold is adequate or not. To this end, one of the robot's legs is employed to haptically explore an unknown ...Conference Paper -
Concept Study of a Small-Scale Dynamic Legged Robot for Lunar Exploration
(2023)IAC 2023 Conference ProceedingsWhen it comes to the exploration of the lunar surface, many high-reward targets, such as the craters at the lunar south pole or the Aristarchus Plateau, lie in hard-to-reach areas due to steep slopes, crater rims, and unstructured terrain. Therefore, such high-risk high-reward targets are currently out of human and robotic reach. Legged robots present a promising approach to exploring hard-to-access targets on the Moon. Legged robot ...Conference Paper -
Comparison of Legged Single-Robot and Multi-Robot Planetary Analog Exploration Systems
(2023)IAC 2023 Conference ProceedingsThe development of ongoing and future planetary exploration missions calls for novel, effective robotic exploration technologies. Inspired by the recent developments in terrestrial robotic teams, we investigate the design and deployment of heterogeneous robotic teams and the accompanying operation concepts in planetary analog missions. Specifically, we describe a single-robot and a multi-robot system we developed for analog exploration ...Conference Paper -
Fast Traversability Estimation for Wild Visual Navigation
(2023)Proceedings of Robotics: Science and System XIXNatural environments such as forests and grasslands are challenging for robotic navigation because of the false perception of rigid obstacles from high grass, twigs, or bushes. In this work, we propose Wild Visual Navigation (WVN), an online self-supervised learning system for traversability estimation which uses only vision. The system is able to continuously adapt from a short human demonstration in the field. It leverages high-dimensional ...Conference Paper -
Curiosity-Driven Learning of Joint Locomotion and Manipulation Tasks
(2023)Proceedings of Machine Learning Research ~ Proceedings of The 7th Conference on Robot LearningLearning complex locomotion and manipulation tasks presents significant challenges, often requiring extensive engineering of, e.g., reward functions or curricula to provide meaningful feedback to the Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm. This paper proposes an intrinsically motivated RL approach to reduce task-specific engineering. The desired task is encoded in a single sparse reward, i.e., a reward of “+1” is given if the task is ...Conference Paper -
Learning Arm-Assisted Fall Damage Reduction and Recovery for Legged Mobile Manipulators
(2023)2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)Adaptive falling and recovery skills greatly extend the applicability of robot deployments. In the case of legged mobile manipulators, the robot arm could adaptively stop the fall and assist the recovery. Prior works on falling and recovery strategies for legged mobile manipulators usually rely on assumptions such as inelastic collisions and falling in defined directions to enable real-time computation. This paper presents a learning-based ...Conference Paper -
Towards Automatic Discovery of Agile Gaits for Quadrupedal Robots
(2014)2014 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)Developing control methods that allow legged robots to move with skill and agility remains one of the grand challenges in robotics. In order to achieve this ambitious goal, legged robots must possess a wide repertoire of motor skills. A scalable control architecture that can represent a variety of gaits in a unified manner is therefore desirable. Inspired by the motor learning principles observed in nature, we use an optimization approach ...Conference Paper