1.5k citations · 6.3k across the 69 of their papers we have counts for
88 papers
Towards Autonomous Excavation Planning
Lorenzo Terenzi, Marco Hutter
Excavation plans are crucial in construction projects, dictating the dirt disposal strategy and excavation sequence based on the final geometry and machinery available. While most…
Versatile Multi-Contact Planning and Control for Legged Loco-Manipulation
Jean-Pierre Sleiman, Farbod Farshidian, Marco Hutter
Loco-manipulation planning skills are pivotal for expanding the utility of robots in everyday environments. These skills can be assessed based on a system's ability to coordinate c…
Scientific Exploration of Challenging Planetary Analog Environments with a Team of Legged Robots
Philip Arm, Gabriel Waibel, Jan Preisig +8
The interest in exploring planetary bodies for scientific investigation and in-situ resource utilization is ever-rising. Yet, many sites of interest are inaccessible to state-of-th…
RAYEN: Imposition of Hard Convex Constraints on Neural Networks
Jesus Tordesillas, Victor Klemm, Jonathan P. How +1
Despite the numerous applications of convex constraints in Robotics, enforcing them within learning-based frameworks remains an open challenge. Existing techniques either fail to g…
ANYmal Parkour: Learning Agile Navigation for Quadrupedal Robots
David Hoeller, Nikita Rudin, Dhionis Sako +1
Performing agile navigation with four-legged robots is a challenging task due to the highly dynamic motions, contacts with various parts of the robot, and the limited field of view…
SMUG Planner: A Safe Multi-Goal Planner for Mobile Robots in Challenging Environments
Changan Chen, Jonas Frey, Philip Arm +1
Robotic exploration or monitoring missions require mobile robots to autonomously and safely navigate between multiple target locations in potentially challenging environments. Curr…
Fast Traversability Estimation for Wild Visual Navigation
Jonas Frey, Matias Mattamala, Nived Chebrolu +3
Natural 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…
Seeing Through the Grass: Semantic Pointcloud Filter for Support Surface Learning
Anqiao Li, Chenyu Yang, Jonas Frey +3
Mobile ground robots require perceiving and understanding their surrounding support surface to move around autonomously and safely. The support surface is commonly estimated based…
Event-based Agile Object Catching with a Quadrupedal Robot
Benedek Forrai, Takahiro Miki, Daniel Gehrig +2
Quadrupedal robots are conquering various indoor and outdoor applications due to their ability to navigate challenging uneven terrains. Exteroceptive information greatly enhances t…
Learning Arm-Assisted Fall Damage Reduction and Recovery for Legged Mobile Manipulators
Yuntao Ma, Farbod Farshidian, Marco Hutter
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…
ArtPlanner: Robust Legged Robot Navigation in the Field
Lorenz Wellhausen, Marco Hutter
Due to the highly complex environment present during the DARPA Subterranean Challenge, all six funded teams relied on legged robots as part of their robotic team. Their unique loco…
iPlanner: Imperative Path Planning
Fan Yang, Chen Wang, Cesar Cadena +1
The problem of path planning has been studied for years. Classic planning pipelines, including perception, mapping, and path searching, can result in latency and compounding errors…
Learning-based Design and Control for Quadrupedal Robots with Parallel-Elastic Actuators
Filip Bjelonic, Joonho Lee, Philip Arm +4
Parallel-elastic joints can improve the efficiency and strength of robots by assisting the actuators with additional torques. For these benefits to be realized, a spring needs to b…
Orbit: A Unified Simulation Framework for Interactive Robot Learning Environments
Mayank Mittal, Calvin Yu, Qinxi Yu +12
We present Orbit, a unified and modular framework for robot learning powered by NVIDIA Isaac Sim. It offers a modular design to easily and efficiently create robotic environments w…
A Framework for Collaborative Multi-Robot Mapping using Spectral Graph Wavelets
Lukas Bernreiter, Shehryar Khattak, Lionel Ott +3
The exploration of large-scale unknown environments can benefit from the deployment of multiple robots for collaborative mapping. Each robot explores a section of the environment a…
Bayesian Multi-Task Learning MPC for Robotic Mobile Manipulation
Elena Arcari, Maria Vittoria Minniti, Anna Scampicchio +4
Mobile manipulation in robotics is challenging due to the need of solving many diverse tasks, such as opening a door or picking-and-placing an object. Typically, a basic first-prin…
LiDAR-guided object search and detection in Subterranean Environments
Manthan Patel, Gabriel Waibel, Shehryar Khattak +1
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…
CLAD: A Contrastive Learning based Approach for Background Debiasing
Ke Wang, Harshitha Machiraju, Oh-Hyeon Choung +2
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved superhuman performance in multiple vision tasks, especially image classification. However, unlike humans, CNNs leverage spurious…
Advanced Skills by Learning Locomotion and Local Navigation End-to-End
Nikita Rudin, David Hoeller, Marko Bjelonic +1
The common approach for local navigation on challenging environments with legged robots requires path planning, path following and locomotion, which usually requires a locomotion c…
PyPose: A Library for Robot Learning with Physics-based Optimization
Chen Wang, Dasong Gao, Kuan Xu +34
Deep learning has had remarkable success in robotic perception, but its data-centric nature suffers when it comes to generalizing to ever-changing environments. By contrast, physic…
Perceptive Locomotion through Nonlinear Model Predictive Control
Ruben Grandia, Fabian Jenelten, Shaohui Yang +2
Dynamic locomotion in rough terrain requires accurate foot placement, collision avoidance, and planning of the underactuated dynamics of the system. Reliably optimizing for such mo…
Present and Future of SLAM in Extreme Underground Environments
Kamak Ebadi, Lukas Bernreiter, Harel Biggie +28
This paper reports on the state of the art in underground SLAM by discussing different SLAM strategies and results across six teams that participated in the three-year-long SubT co…
Self-Supervised Traversability Prediction by Learning to Reconstruct Safe Terrain
Robin Schmid, Deegan Atha, Frederik Schöller +8
Navigating off-road with a fast autonomous vehicle depends on a robust perception system that differentiates traversable from non-traversable terrain. Typically, this depends on a…
Collision detection and identification for a legged manipulator
Jessie van Dam, Andreea Tulbure, Maria Vittoria Minniti +2
To safely deploy legged robots in the real world it is necessary to provide them with the ability to reliably detect unexpected contacts and accurately estimate the corresponding c…