Publications (108)
The Omega Turn: A General Turning Template for Elongate Robots
Baxi Chong, Tianyu Wang, Kelimar Diaz +12
Elongate limbless robots have the potential to locomote through tightly packed spaces for applications such as search-and-rescue and industrial inspections. The capability to effec…
A Conflict-Based Search Framework for Multi-Objective Multi-Agent Path Finding
Zhongqiang Ren, Sivakumar Rathinam, Howie Choset
Conventional multi-agent path planners typically compute an ensemble of paths while optimizing a single objective, such as path length. However, many applications may require multi…
A Mixed-Integer Conic Program for the Moving-Target Traveling Salesman Problem based on a Graph of Convex Sets
Allen George Philip, Zhongqiang Ren, Sivakumar Rathinam +1
This paper introduces a new formulation that finds the optimum for the Moving-Target Traveling Salesman Problem (MT-TSP), which seeks to find a shortest path for an agent, that sta…
GLSO: Grammar-guided Latent Space Optimization for Sample-efficient Robot Design Automation
Jiaheng Hu, Julian Whiman, Howie Choset
Robots have been used in all sorts of automation, and yet the design of robots remains mainly a manual task. We seek to provide design tools to automate the design of robots themse…
Heuristic Search for Path Finding with Refuelling
Shizhe Zhao, Anushtup Nandy, Howie Choset +2
This paper considers a generalization of the Path Finding (PF) problem with refuelling constraints referred to as the Gas Station Problem (GSP). Similar to PF, given a graph where…
Modelling and Path Planning of Snake Robot in cluttered environment
Akash Singh, Chaohui Gong, Howie Choset
Studying snake robot locomotion in a cluttered environment has been a complicated task because the motion model is discontinuous due to the physical contact with obstacles, and the…
Reslicing Ultrasound Images for Data Augmentation and Vessel Reconstruction
Cecilia Morales, Jason Yao, Tejas Rane +3
Robot-guided catheter insertion has the potential to deliver urgent medical care in situations where medical personnel are unavailable. However, this technique requires accurate an…
Trajectory-Optimized Sensing for Active Search of Tissue Abnormalities in Robotic Surgery
Hadi Salman, Elif Ayvali, Rangaprasad Arun Srivatsan +6
In this work, we develop an approach for guiding robots to automatically localize and find the shapes of tumors and other stiff inclusions present in the anatomy. Our approach uses…
Sidewinding with minimal slip: Snake and robot ascent of sandy slopes
Hamidreza Marvi, Chaohui Gong, Nick Gravish +7
Limbless organisms such as snakes can navigate nearly all terrain. In particular, desert-dwelling sidewinder rattlesnakes (Crotalus cerastes) operate effectively on inclined granul…
One Framework to Register Them All: PointNet Encoding for Point Cloud Alignment
Vinit Sarode, Xueqian Li, Hunter Goforth +5
PointNet has recently emerged as a popular representation for unstructured point cloud data, allowing application of deep learning to tasks such as object detection, segmentation a…
MS*: A New Exact Algorithm for Multi-agent Simultaneous Multi-goal Sequencing and Path Finding
Zhongqiang Ren, Sivakumar Rathinam, Howie Choset
In multi-agent applications such as surveillance and logistics, fleets of mobile agents are often expected to coordinate and safely visit a large number of goal locations as effici…
Assigning Credit with Partial Reward Decoupling in Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization
Aditya Kapoor, Benjamin Freed, Howie Choset +1
Multi-agent proximal policy optimization (MAPPO) has recently demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on challenging multi-agent reinforcement learning tasks. However, MAPPO stil…
Learning Modular Robot Control Policies
Julian Whitman, Matthew Travers, Howie Choset
Modular robots can be rearranged into a new design, perhaps each day, to handle a wide variety of tasks by forming a customized robot for each new task. However, reconfiguring just…
Multi-Agent Ergodic Exploration under Smoke-Based, Time-Varying Sensor Visibility Constraints
Elena Wittemyer, Ananya Rao, Ian Abraham +1
In this work, we consider the problem of multi-agent informative path planning (IPP) for robots whose sensor visibility continuously changes as a consequence of a time-varying natu…
Learning Modular Robot Visual-motor Locomotion Policies
Julian Whitman, Howie Choset
Control policy learning for modular robot locomotion has previously been limited to proprioceptive feedback and flat terrain. This paper develops policies for modular systems with…
A Complete Algorithm for a Moving Target Traveling Salesman Problem with Obstacles
Anoop Bhat, Geordan Gutow, Bhaskar Vundurthy +3
The moving target traveling salesman problem with obstacles (MT-TSP-O) is a generalization of the traveling salesman problem (TSP) where, as its name suggests, the targets are movi…
Parallel, Asymptotically Optimal Algorithms for Moving Target Traveling Salesman Problems
Anoop Bhat, Geordan Gutow, Bhaskar Vundurthy +3
The Moving Target Traveling Salesman Problem (MT-TSP) seeks a trajectory that intercepts several moving targets, within a particular time window for each target. When generic nonli…
DMS*: Minimizing Makespan for Multi-Agent Combinatorial Path Finding
Zhongqiang Ren, Anushtup Nandy, Sivakumar Rathinam +1
Multi-Agent Combinatorial Path Finding (MCPF) seeks collision-free paths for multiple agents from their initial to goal locations, while visiting a set of intermediate target locat…
3D Segmentation Learning from Sparse Annotations and Hierarchical Descriptors
Peng Yin, Lingyun Xu, Jianmin Ji +2
One of the main obstacles to 3D semantic segmentation is the significant amount of endeavor required to generate expensive point-wise annotations for fully supervised training. To…
Distributed Learning of Decentralized Control Policies for Articulated Mobile Robots
Guillaume Sartoretti, William Paivine, Yunfei Shi +2
State-of-the-art distributed algorithms for reinforcement learning rely on multiple independent agents, which simultaneously learn in parallel environments while asynchronously upd…
Think Fast: Real-Time Kinodynamic Belief-Space Planning for Projectile Interception
Gabriel Olin, Lu Chen, Nayesha Gandotra +2
Intercepting fast moving objects, by its very nature, is challenging because of its tight time constraints. This problem becomes further complicated in the presence of sensor noise…
A Convex Formulation of the Soft-Capture Problem
Ibrahima Sory Sow, Geordan Gutow, Howie Choset +1
We present a fast trajectory optimization algorithm for the soft capture of uncooperative tumbling space objects. Our algorithm generates safe, dynamically feasible, and minimum-fu…
Enhanced Multi-Objective A* with Partial Expansion
Valmiki Kothare, Zhongqiang Ren, Sivakumar Rathinam +1
The Multi-Objective Shortest Path Problem (MO-SPP), typically posed on a graph, determines a set of paths from a start vertex to a destination vertex while optimizing multiple obje…
PRIMAL: Pathfinding via Reinforcement and Imitation Multi-Agent Learning
Guillaume Sartoretti, Justin Kerr, Yunfei Shi +4
Multi-agent path finding (MAPF) is an essential component of many large-scale, real-world robot deployments, from aerial swarms to warehouse automation. However, despite the commun…
MaskNet: A Fully-Convolutional Network to Estimate Inlier Points
Vinit Sarode, Animesh Dhagat, Rangaprasad Arun Srivatsan +3
Point clouds have grown in importance in the way computers perceive the world. From LIDAR sensors in autonomous cars and drones to the time of flight and stereo vision systems in o…
LiPO: LiDAR Inertial Odometry for ICP Comparison
Darwin Mick, Taylor Pool, Madankumar Sathenahally Nagaraju +3
We introduce a LiDAR inertial odometry (LIO) framework, called LiPO, that enables direct comparisons of different iterative closest point (ICP) point cloud registration methods. Th…
Implicit Graph Search for Planning on Graphs of Convex Sets
Ramkumar Natarajan, Chaoqi Liu, Howie Choset +1
Graphs of Convex Sets (GCS) is a recent method for synthesizing smooth trajectories by decomposing the planning space into convex sets, forming a graph to encode the adjacency rela…
C*: A New Bounding Approach for the Moving-Target Traveling Salesman Problem
Allen George Philip, Zhongqiang Ren, Sivakumar Rathinam +1
We introduce a new bounding approach called Continuity* C*, which provides optimality guarantees for the Moving-Target Traveling Salesman Problem (MT-TSP). Our approach relaxes the…
Globally optimal registration of noisy point clouds
Rangaprasad Arun Srivatsan, Tejas Zodage, Howie Choset
Registration of 3D point clouds is a fundamental task in several applications of robotics and computer vision. While registration methods such as iterative closest point and varian…
Subdimensional Expansion for Multi-objective Multi-agent Path Finding
Zhongqiang Ren, Sivakumar Rathinam, Howie Choset
Conventional multi-agent path planners typically determine a path that optimizes a single objective, such as path length. Many applications, however, may require multiple objective…
A surgical system for automatic registration, stiffness mapping and dynamic image overlay
Nicolas Zevallos, Rangaprasad Arun Srivatsan, Hadi Salman +6
In this paper we develop a surgical system using the da Vinci research kit (dVRK) that is capable of autonomously searching for tumors and dynamically displaying the tumor location…
Learning Modular Robot Locomotion from Demonstrations
Julian Whitman, Howie Choset
Modular robots can be reconfigured to create a variety of designs from a small set of components. But constructing a robot's hardware on its own is not enough -- each robot needs a…
The Geometric Structure of Externally Actuated Planar Locomoting Systems in Ambient Media
Blake Buchanan, Tony Dear, Scott Kelly +2
Robots often interact with the world via attached parts such as wheels, joints, or appendages. In many systems, these interactions, and the manner in which they lead to locomotion,…
Directional Compliance in Obstacle-Aided Navigation for Snake Robots
Tianyu Wang, Julian Whitman, Matthew Travers +1
Snake robots have the potential to maneuver through tightly packed and complex environments. One challenge in enabling them to do so is the complexity in determining how to coordin…
Gait design for limbless obstacle aided locomotion using geometric mechanics
Baxi Chong, Tianyu Wang, Daniel Irvine +5
Limbless robots have the potential to maneuver through cluttered environments that conventional robots cannot traverse. As illustrated in their biological counterparts such as snak…
A general locomotion control framework for multi-legged locomotors
Baxi Chong, Yasemin O. Aydin, Jennifer M. Rieser +13
Serially connected robots are promising candidates for performing tasks in confined spaces such as search-and-rescue in large-scale disasters. Such robots are typically limbless, a…
Multi-objective Conflict-based Search Using Safe-interval Path Planning
Zhongqiang Ren, Sivakumar Rathinam, Maxim Likhachev +1
This paper addresses a generalization of the well known multi-agent path finding (MAPF) problem that optimizes multiple conflicting objectives simultaneously such as travel time an…
Interleaving Graph Search and Trajectory Optimization for Aggressive Quadrotor Flight
Ramkumar Natarajan, Howie Choset, Maxim Likhachev
Quadrotors can achieve aggressive flight by tracking complex maneuvers and rapidly changing directions. Planning for aggressive flight with trajectory optimization could be incredi…
RPT*: Global Planning with Probabilistic Terminals for Target Search in Complex Environments
Yunpeng Lyu, Chao Cao, Ji Zhang +2
Routing problems such as Hamiltonian Path Problem (HPP), seeks a path to visit all the vertices in a graph while minimizing the path cost. This paper studies a variant, HPP with Pr…
ALITA: A Large-scale Incremental Dataset for Long-term Autonomy
Peng Yin, Shiqi Zhao, Ruohai Ge +5
For long-term autonomy, most place recognition methods are mainly evaluated on simplified scenarios or simulated datasets, which cannot provide solid evidence to evaluate the readi…
A Complete and Bounded-Suboptimal Algorithm for a Moving Target Traveling Salesman Problem with Obstacles in 3D
Anoop Bhat, Geordan Gutow, Bhaskar Vundurthy +3
The moving target traveling salesman problem with obstacles (MT-TSP-O) seeks an obstacle-free trajectory for an agent that intercepts a given set of moving targets, each within spe…
iSimLoc: Visual Global Localization for Previously Unseen Environments with Simulated Images
Peng Yin, Ivan Cisneros, Ji Zhang +2
The visual camera is an attractive device in beyond visual line of sight (B-VLOS) drone operation, since they are low in size, weight, power, and cost, and can provide redundant mo…
General Place Recognition Survey: Towards the Real-world Autonomy Age
Peng Yin, Shiqi Zhao, Ivan Cisneros +6
Place recognition is the fundamental module that can assist Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) in loop-closure detection and re-localization for long-term navigation. The…
A Lower Bounding Framework for Motion Planning amid Dynamic Obstacles in 2D
Zhongqiang Ren, Sivakumar Rathinam, Howie Choset
This work considers a Motion Planning Problem with Dynamic Obstacles (MPDO) in 2D that requires finding a minimum-arrival-time collision-free trajectory for a point robot between i…
Learning to Sequence Robot Behaviors for Visual Navigation
Hadi Salman, Puneet Singhal, Tanmay Shankar +6
Recent literature in the robotics community has focused on learning robot behaviors that abstract out lower-level details of robot control. To fully leverage the efficacy of such b…
DeformX: A Versatile Co-Simulation Framework for Deformable Linear Objects
Yi Yang, Xiang Fei, Lehong Wang +5
Deformable linear objects (DLOs) such as wires, cables, and ropes are common in robotic manipulation tasks, yet simulating them with both visual realism and physical accuracy remai…
Unsupervised Deformable Image Registration for Respiratory Motion Compensation in Ultrasound Images
FNU Abhimanyu, Andrew L. Orekhov, John Galeotti +1
In this paper, we present a novel deep-learning model for deformable registration of ultrasound images and an unsupervised approach to training this model. Our network employs recu…
Enhanced Multi-Objective A* Using Balanced Binary Search Trees
Zhongqiang Ren, Richard Zhan, Sivakumar Rathinam +2
This work addresses a Multi-Objective Shortest Path Problem (MO-SPP) on a graph where the goal is to find a set of Pareto-optimal solutions from a start node to a destination in th…
Adversary A3C for Robust Reinforcement Learning
Zhaoyuan Gu, Zhenzhong Jia, Howie Choset
Asynchronous Advantage Actor Critic (A3C) is an effective Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm for a wide range of tasks, such as Atari games and robot control. The agent learns p…
Geometric visualization of self-propulsion in a complex medium
Ross L. Hatton, Yang Ding, Howie Choset +1
Combining geometric mechanics theory, laboratory robotic experiment and numerical simulation, we study the locomotion in granular media (GM) of the simplest non-inertial swimmer, t…
Autonomously Unweaving Multiple Cables Using Visual Feedback
Tina Tian, Xinyu Wang, Andrew L. Orekhov +4
Many cable management tasks involve separating out the different cables and removing tangles. Automating this task is challenging because cables are deformable and can have combina…
Multi-CAP: A Multi-Robot Connectivity-Aware Hierarchical Coverage Path Planning Algorithm for Unknown Environments
Zongyuan Shen, Burhanuddin Shirose, Prasanna Sriganesh +3
Efficient coordination of multiple robots for coverage of large, unknown environments is a significant challenge that involves minimizing the total coverage path length while reduc…
Long Horizon Planning through Contact using Discrete Search and Continuous Optimization
Ramkumar Natarajan, Garrison L. H. Johnston, Nabil Simaan +2
Robots often have to perform manipulation tasks in close proximity to people. As such, it is desirable to use a robot arm that has limited joint torques to not injure the nearby pe…
Geometric phase predicts locomotion performance in undulating living systems across scales
Jennifer M Rieser, Baxi Chong, Chaohui Gong +8
Self-propelling organisms locomote via generation of patterns of self-deformation. Despite the diversity of body plans, internal actuation schemes and environments in limbless vert…
The Geometry of Optimal Gaits for Inertia-dominated Kinematic Systems
Ross L. Hatton, Zachary Brock, Shuoqi Chen +5
Isolated mechanical systems -- e.g., those floating in space, in free-fall, or on a frictionless surface -- are able to achieve net rotation by cyclically changing their shape, eve…
A Study of Domain Generalization on Ultrasound-based Multi-Class Segmentation of Arteries, Veins, Ligaments, and Nerves Using Transfer Learning
Edward Chen, Tejas Sudharshan Mathai, Vinit Sarode +2
Identifying landmarks in the femoral area is crucial for ultrasound (US) -based robot-guided catheter insertion, and their presentation varies when imaged with different scanners.…
Ergodic Exploration over Meshable Surfaces
Dayi Dong, Albert Xu, Geordan Gutow +2
Robotic search and rescue, exploration, and inspection require trajectory planning across a variety of domains. A popular approach to trajectory planning for these types of mission…
State Estimation for Legged Robots Using Contact-Centric Leg Odometry
Shuo Yang, Hans Kumar, Zhaoyuan Gu +3
Our goal is to send legged robots into challenging, unstructured terrains that wheeled systems cannot traverse. Moreover, precise estimation of the robot's position and orientation…
Loosely Synchronized Search for Multi-agent Path Finding with Asynchronous Actions
Zhongqiang Ren, Sivakumar Rathinam, Howie Choset
Multi-agent path finding (MAPF) determines an ensemble of collision-free paths for multiple agents between their respective start and goal locations. Among the available MAPF plann…
ALTO: A Large-Scale Dataset for UAV Visual Place Recognition and Localization
Ivan Cisneros, Peng Yin, Ji Zhang +2
We present the ALTO dataset, a vision-focused dataset for the development and benchmarking of Visual Place Recognition and Localization methods for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. The da…
Optimal Solutions for the Moving Target Vehicle Routing Problem with Obstacles via Lazy Branch and Price
Anoop Bhat, Geordan Gutow, Surya Singh +3
The Moving Target Vehicle Routing Problem with Obstacles (MT-VRP-O) seeks trajectories for several agents that collectively intercept a set of moving targets. Each target has one o…
Multi-Objective Path-Based D* Lite
Zhongqiang Ren, Sivakumar Rathinam, Maxim Likhachev +1
Incremental graph search algorithms such as D* Lite reuse previous, and perhaps partial, searches to expedite subsequent path planning tasks. In this article, we are interested in…
Optimizing Start Locations in Ergodic Search for Disaster Response
Ananya Rao, Alyssa Hargis, David Wettergreen +1
In disaster response scenarios, deploying robotic teams effectively is crucial for improving situational awareness and enhancing search and rescue operations. The use of robots in…
Using Bayesian Optimization to Guide Probing of a Flexible Environment for Simultaneous Registration and Stiffness Mapping
Elif Ayvali, Rangaprasad Arun Srivatsan, Long Wang +3
One of the goals of computer-aided surgery is to match intraoperative data to preoperative images of the anatomy and add complementary information that can facilitate the task of s…
General Place Recognition Survey: Towards Real-World Autonomy
Peng Yin, Jianhao Jiao, Shiqi Zhao +5
In the realm of robotics, the quest for achieving real-world autonomy, capable of executing large-scale and long-term operations, has positioned place recognition (PR) as a corners…
Propagative Distance Optimization for Constrained Inverse Kinematics
Yu Chen, Yilin Cai, Jinyun Xu +3
This paper investigates a constrained inverse kinematic (IK) problem that seeks a feasible configuration of an articulated robot under various constraints such as joint limits and…
Generalized Omega Turn Gait Enables Agile Limbless Robot Turning in Complex Environments
Tianyu Wang, Baxi Chong, Yuelin Deng +3
Reorientation (turning in plane) plays a critical role for all robots in any field application, especially those that in confined spaces. While important, reorientation remains a r…
Multi-agent Collective Construction using 3D Decomposition
Akshaya Kesarimangalam Srinivasan, Shambhavi Singh, Geordan Gutow +2
This paper addresses a Multi-Agent Collective Construction (MACC) problem that aims to build a three-dimensional structure comprised of cubic blocks. We use cube-shaped robots that…
Adversarial Game-Theoretic Algorithm for Dexterous Grasp Synthesis
Yu Chen, Botao He, Yuemin Mao +7
For many complex tasks, multi-finger robot hands are poised to revolutionize how we interact with the world, but reliably grasping objects remains a significant challenge. We focus…
Bag-of-Word-Groups (BoWG): A Robust and Efficient Loop Closure Detection Method Under Perceptual Aliasing
Xiang Fei, Tina Tian, Howie Choset +1
Loop closure is critical in Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems to reduce accumulative drift and ensure global mapping consistency. However, conventional methods s…
Analysis of Interior Rubble Void Spaces at Champlain Towers South Collapse
Ananya Rao, Robin Murphy, David Merrick +1
The 2021 Champlain Towers South Condominiums collapse in Surfside, Florida, resulted 98 deaths. Nine people are thought to have survived the initial collapse, and might have been r…
Correspondence Matrices are Underrated
Tejas Zodage, Rahul Chakwate, Vinit Sarode +2
Point-cloud registration (PCR) is an important task in various applications such as robotic manipulation, augmented and virtual reality, SLAM, etc. PCR is an optimization problem i…
Trajectory Generation for Millimeter Scale Ferromagnetic Swimmers: Theory and Experiments
Jaskaran Grover, Daniel Vedova, Nalini Jain +3
Microrobots have the potential to impact many areas such as microsurgery, micromanipulation and minimally invasive sensing. Due to their small size, microrobots swim in a regime th…
Measure Preserving Flows for Ergodic Search in Convoluted Environments
Albert Xu, Bhaskar Vundurthy, Geordan Gutow +3
Autonomous robotic search has important applications in robotics, such as the search for signs of life after a disaster. When \emph{a priori} information is available, for example…
Unsupervised Deformable Ultrasound Image Registration and Its Application for Vessel Segmentation
FNU Abhimanyu, Andrew L. Orekhov, Ananya Bal +2
This paper presents a deep-learning model for deformable registration of ultrasound images at online rates, which we call U-RAFT. As its name suggests, U-RAFT is based on RAFT, a c…
RGB-X Classification for Electronics Sorting
FNU Abhimanyu, Tejas Zodage, Umesh Thillaivasan +8
Effectively disassembling and recovering materials from waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) is a critical step in moving global supply chains from carbon-intensive, mi…
Optimal Solutions for the Moving Target Vehicle Routing Problem via Branch-and-Price with Relaxed Continuity
Anoop Bhat, Geordan Gutow, Zhongqiang Ren +2
The Moving Target Vehicle Routing Problem (MT-VRP) seeks trajectories for several agents that intercept a set of moving targets, subject to speed, time window, and capacity constra…
Learning Cooperative Multi-Agent Policies with Partial Reward Decoupling
Benjamin Freed, Aditya Kapoor, Ian Abraham +2
One of the preeminent obstacles to scaling multi-agent reinforcement learning to large numbers of agents is assigning credit to individual agents' actions. In this paper, we addres…
Automatic Cannulation of Femoral Vessels in a Porcine Shock Model
Nico Zevallos, Cecilia G. Morales, Andrew Orekhov +7
Rapid and reliable vascular access is critical in trauma and critical care. Central vascular catheterization enables high-volume resuscitation, hemodynamic monitoring, and advanced…
A review on locomotion robophysics: the study of movement at the intersection of robotics, soft matter and dynamical systems
Jeffrey Aguilar, Tingnan Zhang, Feifei Qian +11
In this review we argue for the creation of a physics of moving systems -- a locomotion "robophysics" -- which we define as the pursuit of the discovery of principles of self gener…
A-MHA*: Anytime Multi-Heuristic A*
Ramkumar Natarajan, Muhammad Suhail Saleem, William Xiao +3
Designing good heuristic functions for graph search requires adequate domain knowledge. It is often easy to design heuristics that perform well and correlate with the underlying tr…
PCRNet: Point Cloud Registration Network using PointNet Encoding
Vinit Sarode, Xueqian Li, Hunter Goforth +4
PointNet has recently emerged as a popular representation for unstructured point cloud data, allowing application of deep learning to tasks such as object detection, segmentation a…
Ergodic Coverage In Constrained Environments Using Stochastic Trajectory Optimization
Elif Ayvali, Hadi Salman, Howie Choset
In search and surveillance applications in robotics, it is intuitive to spatially distribute robot trajectories with respect to the probability of locating targets in the domain. E…
System Design of the Ultra Mobility Vehicle: A Driving, Balancing, and Jumping Bicycle Robot
Benjamin Bokser, Daniel Gonzalez, Aaron Preston +39
Trials cyclists and mountain bike riders can hop, jump, balance, and drive on one or both wheels. This versatility allows them to achieve speed and energy-efficiency on smooth terr…
xBD: A Dataset for Assessing Building Damage from Satellite Imagery
Ritwik Gupta, Richard Hosfelt, Sandra Sajeev +6
We present xBD, a new, large-scale dataset for the advancement of change detection and building damage assessment for humanitarian assistance and disaster recovery research. Natura…
NavMoE: Hybrid Model- and Learning-based Traversability Estimation for Local Navigation via Mixture of Experts
Botao He, Amir Hossein Shahidzadeh, Yu Chen +8
This paper explores traversability estimation for robot navigation. A key bottleneck in traversability estimation lies in efficiently achieving reliable and robust predictions whil…
Equality Constrained Linear Optimal Control With Factor Graphs
Shuo Yang, Gerry Chen, Yetong Zhang +2
This paper presents a novel factor graph-based approach to solve the discrete-time finite-horizon Linear Quadratic Regulator problem subject to auxiliary linear equality constraint…
Next Generation Robotics
Henrik I Christensen, Allison Okamura, Maja Mataric +3
The National Robotics Initiative (NRI) was launched 2011 and is about to celebrate its 5 year anniversary. In parallel with the NRI, the robotics community, with support from the C…
Two-Phase Bilevel Search for the Moving-Target Traveling Salesman Problem with Moving Obstacles
Allen George Philip, Anoop Bhat, Sivakumar Rathinam +1
The Moving-Target Traveling Salesman Problem (MT-TSP) seeks a minimum cost trajectory for an agent that departs from a static depot, visits a set of moving targets, each within one…
A Mixed-Integer Conic Program for the Multi-Agent Moving-Target Traveling Salesman Problem
Allen George Philip, Zhongqiang Ren, Sivakumar Rathinam +1
The Moving-Target Traveling Salesman Problem (MT-TSP) seeks a shortest path for an agent that starts at a stationary depot, visits a set of moving targets exactly once, each within…
Design and Implementation of a Three-Link Brachiation Robot with Optimal Control Based Trajectory Tracking Controller
Shuo Yang, Zhaoyuan Gu, Ruohai Ge +3
This paper reports the design and implementation of a three-link brachiation robot. The robot is able to travel along horizontal monkey bars using continuous arm swings. We build a…
Preprocessing-based Kinodynamic Motion Planning Framework for Intercepting Projectiles using a Robot Manipulator
Ramkumar Natarajan, Hanlan Yang, Qintong Xie +6
We are interested in studying sports with robots and starting with the problem of intercepting a projectile moving toward a robot manipulator equipped with a shield. To successfull…
Autonomous Exploration Development Environment and the Planning Algorithms
Chao Cao, Hongbiao Zhu, Fan Yang +4
Autonomous Exploration Development Environment is an open-source repository released to facilitate the development of high-level planning algorithms and integration of complete aut…
AutoMerge: A Framework for Map Assembling and Smoothing in City-scale Environments
Peng Yin, Haowen Lai, Shiqi Zhao +4
We present AutoMerge, a LiDAR data processing framework for assembling a large number of map segments into a complete map. Traditional large-scale map merging methods are fragile t…
Mathematical Justification of Hard Negative Mining via Isometric Approximation Theorem
Albert Xu, Jhih-Yi Hsieh, Bhaskar Vundurthy +3
In deep metric learning, the Triplet Loss has emerged as a popular method to learn many computer vision and natural language processing tasks such as facial recognition, object det…
Motion Informed Needle Segmentation in Ultrasound Images
Raghavv Goel, Cecilia Morales, Manpreet Singh +3
Segmenting a moving needle in ultrasound images is challenging due to the presence of artifacts, noise, and needle occlusion. This task becomes even more demanding in scenarios whe…
Design of a Biomimetic Tactile Sensor for Material Classification
Kevin Dai, Xinyu Wang, Allison M. Rojas +8
Tactile sensing typically involves active exploration of unknown surfaces and objects, making it especially effective at processing the characteristics of materials and textures. A…
Subdimensional Expansion Using Attention-Based Learning For Multi-Agent Path Finding
Lakshay Virmani, Zhongqiang Ren, Sivakumar Rathinam +1
Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) finds conflict-free paths for multiple agents from their respective start to goal locations. MAPF is challenging as the joint configuration space gr…
Reconstruction of Backbone Curves for Snake Robots
Tianyu Wang, Bo Lin, Baxi Chong +5
Snake robots composed of alternating single-axis pitch and yaw joints have many internal degrees of freedom, which make them capable of versatile three-dimensional locomotion. In m…
FusionMapping: Learning Depth Prediction with Monocular Images and 2D Laser Scans
Peng Yin, Jianing Qian, Yibo Cao +2
Acquiring accurate three-dimensional depth information conventionally requires expensive multibeam LiDAR devices. Recently, researchers have developed a less expensive option by pr…