This paper presents an online informative path planning approach for active information gathering on three-dimensional surfaces using aerial robots. Most existing works on surface inspection focus on planning a path offline that can provide full coverage of the surface, which inherently assumes the surface information is uniformly distributed hence ignoring potential spatial correlations of the information field. In this paper, we utilize ...

Manipulators can be added to legged robots, allowing them to interact with and change their environment. Legged mobile manipulation planners must consider how contact forces generated by these manipulators affect the system. Current planning strategies either treat these forces as immutable during planning or are unable to optimize over these contact forces while operating in real time. This paper presents the Stability and Task Oriented ...

Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) has been widely used and researched to control and aid the automation of navigation of robots especially in the absence of absolute position measurements, such as GPS. However, when the observable landmarks in the scene lie far away, as in high-altitude flights for example, the fidelity of the metric scale estimate in VIO greatly degrades. Aiming to tackle this issue, in this work, we utilize the virtual ...

We present a novel hierarchical POMDP framework to solve an object search and delivery task where the agent is given a prior belief about the possible item locations. Solving POMDPs is computationally demanding and, as such, applications have typically been limited to small environments. The proposed hierarchical POMDP framework performs reasoning on multiple spatial scales in order to reduce computation time. The problem is first solved ...

Model-based controllers on real robots require accurate knowledge of the system dynamics to perform optimally. For complex dynamics, first-principles modeling is not sufficiently precise, and data-driven approaches can be leveraged to learn a statistical model from real experiments. However, the efficient and effective data collection for such a data-driven system on real robots is still an open challenge. This paper introduces an ...