Publications (233)
Pose-Aware Person Recognition
Vijay Kumar, Anoop Namboodiri, Manohar Paluri +1
Person recognition methods that use multiple body regions have shown significant improvements over traditional face-based recognition. One of the primary challenges in full-body pe…
Air-Ground Collaboration for Language-Specified Missions in Unknown Environments
Fernando Cladera, Zachary Ravichandran, Jason Hughes +6
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…
Learning Decentralized Controllers for Robot Swarms with Graph Neural Networks
Ekaterina Tolstaya, Fernando Gama, James Paulos +3
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 l…
Learning Sample-Efficient Target Reaching for Mobile Robots
Arbaaz Khan, Vijay Kumar, Alejandro Ribeiro
In this paper, we propose a novel architecture and a self-supervised policy gradient algorithm, which employs unsupervised auxiliary tasks to enable a mobile robot to learn how to…
3D Active Metric-Semantic SLAM
Yuezhan Tao, Xu Liu, Igor Spasojevic +2
In this letter, we address the problem of exploration and metric-semantic mapping of multi-floor GPS-denied indoor environments using Size Weight and Power (SWaP) constrained aeria…
Mine Tunnel Exploration using Multiple Quadrupedal Robots
Ian D. Miller, Fernando Cladera, Anthony Cowley +11
Robotic exploration of underground environments is a particularly challenging problem due to communication, endurance, and traversability constraints which necessitate high degrees…
Don't Yell at Your Robot: Physical Correction as the Collaborative Interface for Language Model Powered Robots
Chuye Zhang, Yifei Simon Shao, Harshil Parekh +4
We present a novel approach for enhancing human-robot collaboration using physical interactions for real-time error correction of large language model (LLM) powered robots. Unlike…
Decentralized Risk-Aware Tracking of Multiple Targets
Jiazhen Liu, Lifeng Zhou, Ragesh Ramachandran +2
We consider the setting where a team of robots is tasked with tracking multiple targets with the following property: approaching the targets enables more accurate target position e…
Cooperative Team Strategies for Multi-player Perimeter-Defense Games
Daigo Shishika, James Paulos, Vijay Kumar
This paper studies a variant of the multi-player reach-avoid game played between intruders and defenders with applications to perimeter defense. The intruder team tries to score by…
Monocular Event-Based Vision for Obstacle Avoidance with a Quadrotor
Anish Bhattacharya, Marco Cannici, Nishanth Rao +4
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 env…
Stronger Together: Air-Ground Robotic Collaboration Using Semantics
Ian D. Miller, Fernando Cladera, Trey Smith +2
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 tim…
LMPath: Language-Mediated Priors and Path Generation for Aerial Exploration
Jonathan A. Diller, Fernando Cladera, Camillo J. Taylor +1
Traditional autonomous UAV search missions rely on geometric coverage patterns that ignore the semantic context of the target, leading to significant time waste in large-scale envi…
Real Time Dense Depth Estimation by Fusing Stereo with Sparse Depth Measurements
Shreyas S. Shivakumar, Kartik Mohta, Bernd Pfrommer +2
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…
Experiments in Fast, Autonomous, GPS-Denied Quadrotor Flight
Kartik Mohta, Ke Sun, Sikang Liu +6
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…
Human Motion Capture Using a Drone
Xiaowei Zhou, Sikang Liu, Georgios Pavlakos +2
Current motion capture (MoCap) systems generally require markers and multiple calibrated cameras, which can be used only in constrained environments. In this work we introduce a dr…
EvDNeRF: Reconstructing Event Data with Dynamic Neural Radiance Fields
Anish Bhattacharya, Ratnesh Madaan, Fernando Cladera +7
We present EvDNeRF, a pipeline for generating event data and training an event-based dynamic NeRF, for the purpose of faithfully reconstructing eventstreams on scenes with rigid an…
A Scalable Multi-Robot Framework for Decentralized and Asynchronous Perception-Action-Communication Loops
Saurav Agarwal, Frederic Vatnsdal, Romina Garcia Camargo +2
Collaboration in large robot swarms to achieve a common global objective is a challenging problem in large environments due to limited sensing and communication capabilities. The r…
Towards Automatic Identification of Globally Valid Geometric Flat Outputs via Numerical Optimization
Jake Welde, Vijay Kumar
Differential flatness enables efficient planning and control for underactuated robotic systems, but we lack a systematic and practical means of identifying a flat output (or determ…
A Compositional Approach to Certifying the Almost Global Asymptotic Stability of Cascade Systems
Jake Welde, Matthew D. Kvalheim, Vijay Kumar
In this work, we give sufficient conditions for the almost global asymptotic stability of a cascade in which the subsystems are only almost globally asymptotically stable. The resu…
Infrastructure Node-based Vehicle Localization for Autonomous Driving
Elijah S. Lee, Ankit Vora, Armin Parchami +3
Vehicle localization is essential for autonomous vehicle (AV) navigation and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Accurate vehicle localization is often achieved via expensiv…
Multi-Robot Localization and Target Tracking with Connectivity Maintenance and Collision Avoidance
Rahul Zahroof, Jiazhen Liu, Lifeng Zhou +1
We study the problem that requires a team of robots to perform joint localization and target tracking task while ensuring team connectivity and collision avoidance. The problem can…
Feedback Enhanced Motion Planning for Autonomous Vehicles
Ke Sun, Brent Schlotfeldt, Stephen Chaves +3
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 latt…
Ecosystem: A Characteristic Of Crowdsourced Environments
Anamika Chhabra, S. R. S. Iyengar, Poonam Saini +2
The phenomenal success of certain crowdsourced online platforms, such as Wikipedia, is accredited to their ability to tap the crowd's potential to collaboratively build knowledge.…
RTGNN: A Novel Approach to Model Stochastic Traffic Dynamics
Ke Sun, Stephen Chaves, Paul Martin +1
Modeling stochastic traffic dynamics is critical to developing self-driving cars. Because it is difficult to develop first principle models of cars driven by humans, there is great…
Collision-free time-optimal path parameterization for multi-robot teams
Katherine Mao, Igor Spasojevic, Malakhi Hopkins +2
Coordinating the motion of multiple robots in cluttered environments remains a computationally challenging task. We study the problem of minimizing the execution time of a set of g…
Neurosymbolic Transformers for Multi-Agent Communication
Jeevana Priya Inala, Yichen Yang, James Paulos +5
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 am…
Stochastic Motion Planning under Partial Observability for Mobile Robots with Continuous Range Measurements
Ke Sun, Brent Schlotfeldt, George Pappas +1
In this paper, we address the problem of stochastic motion planning under partial observability, more specifically, how to navigate a mobile robot equipped with continuous range se…
Spin-Hall effect in the scattering of structured light from plasmonic nanowire
Deepak K. Sharma, Vijay Kumar, Adarsh B. Vasista +2
Spin-orbit interactions are subwavelength phenomena which can potentially lead to numerous device related applications in nanophotonics. Here, we report Spin-Hall effect in the for…
Navigation with shadow prices to optimize multi-commodity flow rates
Ignacio Boero, Igor Spasojevic, Mariana del Castillo +3
We propose a method for providing communication network infrastructure in autonomous multi-agent teams. In particular, we consider a set of communication agents that are placed alo…
DroneFL: Federated Learning for Multi-UAV Visual Target Tracking
Xiaofan Yu, Yuwei Wu, Katherine Mao +3
Multi-robot target tracking is a fundamental problem that requires coordinated monitoring of dynamic entities in applications such as precision agriculture, environmental monitorin…
Machine learning meets Singular Optics: Speckle-based Structured light demultiplexing
Venugopal Raskatla, Purnesh Singh Badavath, Vijay Kumar
In this paper, the advancements in structured light beams recognition using speckle-based convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been presented. Speckle fields, generated by the…
Distilling On-device Language Models for Robot Planning with Minimal Human Intervention
Zachary Ravichandran, Ignacio Hounie, Fernando Cladera +3
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-ho…
Fast nanothermometry based on direct electron detection of electron backscattering diffraction patterns
Ryan Gnabasik, Razan O. Nughays, Ashlynn Overholser +5
Accurate temperature measurement at the nanoscale is crucial for thermal management in next-generation microelectronic devices. Existing optical and scanning-probe thermometry tech…
Importance Sampling based Exploration in Q Learning
Vijay Kumar, Mort Webster
Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) is a methodology to solve multi-stage stochastic optimization problems in multi-dimensional discrete or continuous spaces. ADP approximates th…
Vision-based Perimeter Defense via Multiview Pose Estimation
Elijah S. Lee, Giuseppe Loianno, Dinesh Jayaraman +1
Previous studies in the perimeter defense game have largely focused on the fully observable setting where the true player states are known to all players. However, this is unrealis…
Tactile Displays Driven by Projected Light
Max Linnander, Dustin Goetz, Gregory Reardon +3
Tactile displays that lend tangible form to digital content could transform computing interactions. However, achieving the resolution, speed, and dynamic range needed for perceptua…
LE3D: A Lightweight Ensemble Framework of Data Drift Detectors for Resource-Constrained Devices
Ioannis Mavromatis, Adrian Sanchez-Mompo, Francesco Raimondo +8
Data integrity becomes paramount as the number of Internet of Things (IoT) sensor deployments increases. Sensor data can be altered by benign causes or malicious actions. Mechanism…
Dispersion-Minimizing Motion Primitives for Search-Based Motion Planning
Laura Jarin-Lipschitz, James Paulos, Raymond Bjorkman +1
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, weig…
LPAC: Learnable Perception-Action-Communication Loops with Applications to Coverage Control
Saurav Agarwal, Ramya Muthukrishnan, Walker Gosrich +2
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 decent…
Sequence Modeling for Time-Optimal Quadrotor Trajectory Optimization with Sampling-based Robustness Analysis
Katherine Mao, Hongzhan Yu, Ruipeng Zhang +4
Time-optimal trajectories drive quadrotors to their dynamic limits, but computing such trajectories involves solving non-convex problems via iterative nonlinear optimization, makin…
Toward a Science of Autonomy for Physical Systems
Gregory D. Hager, Daniela Rus, Vijay Kumar +1
Our lives have been immensely improved by decades of automation research -- we are more comfortable, more productive and safer than ever before. Just imagine a world where familiar…
Active movement of foraging sea turtles generates anomalous looping
Vijay Kumar, Vladimir V. Palyulin, Perla Roman-Torres +2
Animals inhabiting diverse environments by moving across different spatial scales, from insects to birds, marine predators, mammals and even humans, often display apparently random…
Machine learning meets Singular Optics II: Single-pixel Detection of Structured Light
Purnesh Singh Badavath, Vijay Kumar
Structured light beams, including Laguerre-Gaussian (LG), Hermite-Gaussian (HG), and perfect vortex (PV) spatial modes, have been at the forefront of modern optics due to their pot…
Enabling End-to-End APT Emulation in Industrial Environments: Design and Implementation of the SIMPLE-ICS Testbed
Yogha Restu Pramadi, Theodoros Spyridopoulos, Vijay Kumar
Research on Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) in industrial environments requires experimental platforms that support realistic end-to-end attack emulation across converged enterp…
A Variational Physics-Informed Neural Network Framework Using Petrov-Galerkin Method for Solving Singularly Perturbed Boundary Value Problems
Vijay Kumar, Gautam Singh
This work proposes a Variational Physics-Informed Neural Network (VPINN) framework that integrates the Petrov-Galerkin formulation with deep neural networks (DNNs) for solving one-…
DFuseNet: Deep Fusion of RGB and Sparse Depth Information for Image Guided Dense Depth Completion
Shreyas S. Shivakumar, Ty Nguyen, Ian D. Miller +3
In this paper we propose a convolutional neural network that is designed to upsample a series of sparse range measurements based on the contextual cues gleaned from a high resoluti…
TOPPQuad: Dynamically-Feasible Time Optimal Path Parametrization for Quadrotors
Katherine Mao, Igor Spasojevic, M. Ani Hsieh +1
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 coll…
The Role of Robotics in Infectious Disease Crises
Gregory Hager, Vijay Kumar, Robin Murphy +2
The recent coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the many challenges faced by the healthcare, public safety, and economic systems when confronted with a surge in patients that requi…
Hierarchical LLMs In-the-Loop Optimization for Real-Time Multi-Robot Target Tracking under Unknown Hazards
Yuwei Wu, Yuezhan Tao, Peihan Li +4
Real-time multi-robot coordination in hazardous and adversarial environments requires fast, reliable adaptation to dynamic threats. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer strong…
Learning Connectivity for Data Distribution in Robot Teams
Ekaterina Tolstaya, Landon Butler, Daniel Mox +3
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 dissem…
A Roadmap for Climate-Relevant Robotics Research
Alan Papalia, Charles Dawson, Laurentiu L. Anton +25
Climate change is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century, and many in the robotics community are looking for ways to contribute. This paper presents a roadmap for clima…
EFLUX: Elastic Multi-Robot Formation Navigation and Adaptation with Agentic LLMs
Jinyuan Zhang, Yuwei Wu, Guangyao Shi +3
The paper introduces EFLUX, a framework that uses a language model to reason about and execute both deformation (scaling, shearing) and reconfiguration (splitting, merging) actions…
Resource-Interaction Graph: Efficient Graph Representation for Anomaly Detection
James Pope, Jinyuan Liang, Vijay Kumar +13
Security research has concentrated on converting operating system audit logs into suitable graphs, such as provenance graphs, for analysis. However, provenance graphs can grow very…
A Macroscopic Model for Differential Privacy in Dynamic Robotic Networks
Amanda Prorok, Vijay Kumar
The increasing availability of online and mobile information platforms is facilitating the development of peer-to-peer collaboration strategies in large-scale networks. These techn…
d-electron induced icosahedral growth in strontium clusters
Tabish Qureshi, Vijay Kumar
Strontium clusters of size 2 to 20 atoms have been studied within the local density approximation using the ab-initio molecular dynamics method with a plane wave basis in which the…
Nonabelian 2D Gauge Theories for Determinantal Calabi-Yau Varieties
Hans Jockers, Vijay Kumar, Joshua M. Lapan +2
The two-dimensional supersymmetric gauged linear sigma model (GLSM) with abelian gauge groups and matter fields has provided many insights into string theory on Calabi--Yau manifol…
Place Recognition in Forests with Urquhart Tessellations
Guilherme V. Nardari, Avraham Cohen, Steven W. Chen +4
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…
The Multi Vehicle Stereo Event Camera Dataset: An Event Camera Dataset for 3D Perception
Alex Zihao Zhu, Dinesh Thakur, Tolga Ozaslan +3
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 dyna…
Inverse Optimal Planning for Air Traffic Control
Ekaterina Tolstaya, Alejandro Ribeiro, Vijay Kumar +1
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 dev…
Leading and beyond leading-order spectral form factor in chaotic quantum many-body systems across all Dyson symmetry classes
Vijay Kumar, Tomaž Prosen, Dibyendu Roy
We show the emergence of random matrix theory (RMT) spectral correlations in the chaotic phase of generic periodically kicked interacting quantum many-body systems by analytically…
Belief Space Planning for Mobile Robots with Range Sensors using iLQG
Ke Sun, Vijay Kumar
In this work, we use iterative Linear Quadratic Gaussian (iLQG) to plan motions for a mobile robot with range sensors in belief space. We address two limitations that prevent appli…
Decentralization of Multiagent Policies by Learning What to Communicate
James Paulos, Steven W. Chen, Daigo Shishika +1
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 t…
Spatial-to-Temporal Orbital Angular Momentum Mapping in Twisted Light Fields
Vijay Kumar, Purnesh Singh Badavath
Optical angular momentum (OAM) in light beams is manifested as the two-dimensional spatial distribution of its complex amplitude, necessitating a 2D detector for its measurement. H…
Spatio-Temporal Metric-Semantic Mapping for Persistent Orchard Monitoring: Method and Dataset
Jiuzhou Lei, Ankit Prabhu, Xu Liu +5
Monitoring orchards at the individual tree or fruit level throughout the growth season is crucial for plant phenotyping and horticultural resource optimization, such as chemical us…
Leveraging Symmetry to Accelerate Learning of Trajectory Tracking Controllers for Free-Flying Robotic Systems
Jake Welde, Nishanth Rao, Pratik Kunapuli +2
Tracking controllers enable robotic systems to accurately follow planned reference trajectories. In particular, reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in the synthesis of co…
Real-Time Glass Detection and Reprojection using Sensor Fusion Onboard Aerial Robots
Malakhi Hopkins, Varun Murali, Vijay Kumar +1
Autonomous aerial robots are increasingly being deployed in real-world scenarios, where transparent obstacles present significant challenges to reliable navigation and mapping. The…
Robust, Perception Based Control with Quadrotors
Laura Jarin-Lipschitz, Rebecca Li, Ty Nguyen +2
Traditionally, controllers and state estimators in robotic systems are designed independently. Controllers are often designed assuming perfect state estimation. However, state esti…
Multi-Agent Exploration of an Unknown Sparse Landmark Complex via Deep Reinforcement Learning
Xiatao Sun, Yuwei Wu, Subhrajit Bhattacharya +1
In recent years Landmark Complexes have been successfully employed for localization-free and metric-free autonomous exploration using a group of sensing-limited and communication-l…
Medical Image Data Provenance for Medical Cyber-Physical System
Vijay Kumar, Kolin Paul
Continuous advancements in medical technology have led to the creation of affordable mobile imaging devices suitable for telemedicine and remote monitoring. However, the rapid exam…
Smallest Fullerene-like Structures of Boron with Cr, Mo, and W Encapsulation
Amol B. Rahane, Pinaki Saha, N. Sukumar +1
Using density functional theory calculations, we study doping of a Cr, Mo, and W atom in boron clusters in the size range of 18-24 atoms and report the finding of metal atom encaps…
ATLAS Navigator: Active Task-driven LAnguage-embedded Gaussian Splatting
Dexter Ong, Yuezhan Tao, Varun Murali +3
We address the challenge of task-oriented navigation in unstructured and unknown environments, where robots must incrementally build and reason on rich, metric-semantic maps in rea…
Multi-Robot Coordination and Cooperation with Task Precedence Relationships
Walker Gosrich, Siddharth Mayya, Saaketh Narayan +3
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 allow…
Monocular Camera Based Fruit Counting and Mapping with Semantic Data Association
Xu Liu, Steven W. Chen, Chenhao Liu +5
We present a cheap, lightweight, and fast fruit counting pipeline that uses a single monocular camera. Our pipeline that relies only on a monocular camera, achieves counting perfor…
Comprehensive study of sodium, copper, and silver clusters over a wide range of sizes 2=<N=<75
Masahiro Itoh, Vijay Kumar, Tadafumi Adschiri +1
The geometric and electronic structures of NaN, CuN, and AgN metal clusters are systematically studied based on the density functional theory over a wide range of cluster sizes 2=<…
A Networked Multi-Agent System for Mobile Wireless Infrastructure on Demand
Miguel Calvo-Fullana, Mikhail Gerasimenko, Daniel Mox +5
Despite the prevalence of wireless connectivity in urban areas around the globe, there remain numerous and diverse situations where connectivity is insufficient or unavailable. To…
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 +3
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 p…
Active Brownian Motion in two-dimensions under Stochastic Resetting
Vijay Kumar, Onkar Sadekar, Urna Basu
We study the position distribution of an active Brownian particle (ABP) in the presence of stochastic resetting in two spatial dimensions. We consider three different resetting pro…
ROS-NetSim: A Framework for the Integration of Robotic and Network Simulators
Miguel Calvo-Fullana, Daniel Mox, Alexander Pyattaev +3
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, Perc…
Entanglement-Assisted Quantum Locally Recoverable Codes: Bounds, Optimal Constructions, and Achievability
Vijay Kumar, Ramakrishna Bandi
This paper studies entanglement-assisted quantum locally recoverable codes (EA-qLRCs) built via a CSS-like stabilizer construction from pairs of classical locally recoverable codes…
MAMPS: Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Model Predictive Shielding
Wenbo Zhang, Osbert Bastani, Vijay Kumar
Reinforcement learning is a promising approach to learning control policies for performing complex multi-agent robotics tasks. However, a policy learned in simulation often fails t…
The Open Vision Computer: An Integrated Sensing and Compute System for Mobile Robots
Morgan Quigley, Kartik Mohta, Shreyas S. Shivakumar +8
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 sys…
Multi-Robot Target Tracking with Sensing and Communication Danger Zones
Jiazhen Liu, Peihan Li, Yuwei Wu +3
Multi-robot target tracking finds extensive applications in different scenarios, such as environmental surveillance and wildfire management, which require the robustness of the pra…
AgriNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Agriculture in Challenging Lighting Conditions
Samarth Chopra, Fernando Cladera, Varun Murali +1
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have shown significant promise in 3D scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis. In agricultural settings, NeRFs can serve as digital twins, provi…
Symskill: Symbol and Skill Co-Invention for Data-Efficient and Reactive Long-Horizon Manipulation
Yifei Simon Shao, Yuchen Zheng, Sunan Sun +3
Multi-step manipulation in dynamic environments remains challenging. Imitation learning (IL) is reactive but lacks compositional generalization, since monolithic policies do not de…
Multi-Robot Coverage and Exploration using Spatial Graph Neural Networks
Ekaterina Tolstaya, James Paulos, Vijay Kumar +1
The multi-robot coverage problem is an essential building block for systems that perform tasks like inspection or search and rescue. We discretize the coverage problem to induce a…
Learning Connectivity-Maximizing Network Configurations
Daniel Mox, Vijay Kumar, Alejandro Ribeiro
In this letter we propose a data-driven approach to optimizing the algebraic connectivity of a team of robots. While a considerable amount of research has been devoted to this prob…
Any Way You Look At It: Semantic Crossview Localization and Mapping with LiDAR
Ian D. Miller, Anthony Cowley, Ravi Konkimalla +5
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…
In situ observation of thermally activated and localized Li leaching from lithiated graphite
Harrison Szeto, Vijay Kumar, Yangying Zhu
Temperature is known to impact Li-ion battery performance and safety, however, understanding its effect on Li-ion batteries has largely been limited to uniform high or low temperat…
Measurement of gravitational acceleration in a single laser operated atomic fountain
Kavish Bhardwaj, S. Singh, S. P. Ram +6
We present measurements on Earth's gravitational acceleration (g) using an in-house developed cold atom gravimeter (CAG) in an atomic fountain geometry. In the setup, the laser coo…
MIGHTY: Hermite Spline-based Efficient Trajectory Planning
Kota Kondo, Yuwei Wu, Vijay Kumar +1
Hard-constraint trajectory planners often rely on commercial solvers and demand substantial computational resources. Existing soft-constraint methods achieve faster computation, bu…
Challenges and Opportunities for Large-Scale Exploration with Air-Ground Teams using Semantics
Fernando Cladera, Ian D. Miller, Zachary Ravichandran +5
One common and desirable application of robots is exploring potentially hazardous and unstructured environments. Air-ground collaboration offers a synergistic approach to addressin…
Adaptive and Risk-Aware Target Tracking with Heterogeneous Robot Teams
Siddharth Mayya, Ragesh K. Ramachandran, Lifeng Zhou +2
We consider a scenario where a team of robots with heterogeneous sensors must track a set of hostile targets which induce sensory failures on the robots. In particular, the likelih…
REBAR: Reference Ethical Benchmark for Autonomy Readiness
Jonathan Diller, David Barnes, Rebekah Bogdanoff +14
As autonomous systems grow more advanced, objective metrics to evaluate their ethical and legal compliance are critical for informing end users of their limitations and ensuring ac…
Challenges in the Design and Implementation of IoT Testbeds in Smart-Cities: A Systematic Review
Vijay Kumar, Sam Gunner, Theodoros Spyridopoulos +5
Advancements in wireless communication and the increased accessibility to low-cost sensing and data processing IoT technologies have increased the research and development of urban…
Memory Augmented Control Networks
Arbaaz Khan, Clark Zhang, Nikolay Atanasov +3
Planning problems in partially observable environments cannot be solved directly with convolutional networks and require some form of memory. But, even memory networks with sophist…
Towards Search-based Motion Planning for Micro Aerial Vehicles
Sikang Liu, Kartik Mohta, Nikolay Atanasov +1
Search-based motion planning has been used for mobile robots in many applications. However, it has not been fully developed and applied for planning full state trajectories of Micr…
Dynamic Defender-Attacker Blotto Game
Daigo Shishika, Yue Guan, Michael Dorothy +1
This work studies a dynamic, adversarial resource allocation problem in environments modeled as graphs. A blue team of defender robots are deployed in the environment to protect th…
PennSyn2Real: Training Object Recognition Models without Human Labeling
Ty Nguyen, Ian D. Miller, Avi Cohen +5
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…
STAR-Filter: Efficient Convex Free-Space Approximation via Starshaped Set Filtering in Noisy Environments
Yuwei Wu, Yichen Zhao, Dexter Ong +1
Approximating collision-free space is fundamental to robot planning in complex environments. Convex geometric representations, such as polytopes and ellipsoids, are widely employed…
Almost Global Asymptotic Trajectory Tracking for Fully-Actuated Mechanical Systems on Homogeneous Riemannian Manifolds
Jake Welde, Vijay Kumar
In this work, we address the design of tracking controllers that drive a mechanical system's state asymptotically towards a reference trajectory. Motivated by aerospace and robotic…