Publications related to Motion planning

Dynamic Voxels Based on Ego-Conditioned Prediction: An Integrated Spatio-Temporal Framework for Motion Planning

Prediction is a vital component of motion planning for autonomous vehicles (AVs). By reasoning about the possible behavior of other target agents, the ego vehicle (EV) can navigate safely, efficiently, and politely. However, most of the existing work overl ...

IEEE Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers2024

An Optimal Control Formulation of Tool Affordance Applied to Impact Tasks

Sylvain Calinon, Jie Zhao

Humans use tools to complete impact-aware tasks, such as hammering a nail or playing tennis. The postures adopted to use these tools can significantly influence the performance of these tasks, where the force or velocity of the hand holding a tool plays a ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2024

Sense in Motion with Belief Clustering: Efficient Gas Source Localization with Mobile Robots

Alcherio Martinoli, Wanting Jin

Given the patchy nature of gas plumes and the slow response of conventional gas sensors, the use of mobile robots for Gas Source Localization (GSL) tasks presents significant challenges. These aspects increase the difficulties in obtaining gas measurements ...

2024

Robot Learning using Tensor Networks

Suhan Narayana Shetty

In various robotics applications, the selection of function approximation methods greatly influences the feasibility and computational efficiency of algorithms. Tensor Networks (TNs), also referred to as tensor decomposition techniques, present a versatile ...

EPFL2024

Gas Sensing with Rotary-Wing Nano Aerial Vehicles

Chiara Ercolani

Harmful chemical compounds are released daily in warehouses, chemical plants and during environmental emergencies. Their uncontrolled dispersion contributes to the pollution of the atmosphere and threatens human and animal lives. When gas leaks occur, the ...

EPFL2024

Hitting with Different Joints of a Robotic Manipulator

Aude Billard, Harshit Khurana

This paper builds up the skill of impact aware non prehensile manipulation through a hitting motion by allowing the robot arm to come in contact with the environment with parts other than its end effector. Hitting with other joints allows us to manipulate ...

2024

Certification of Bottleneck Task Assignment With Shortest Path Criteria

Maryam Kamgarpour, Tony Alan Wood

Minimising the longest travel distance for a group of mobile robots with interchangeable goals requires knowledge of the shortest length paths between all robots and goal destinations. Determining the exact length of the shortest paths in an environment wi ...

2023

Motion Planning and Inertia Based Control for Impact Aware Manipulation

Aude Billard, Harshit Khurana

In this paper, we propose a metric called hitting flux which is used in the motion generation and controls for a robot manipulator to interact with the environment through a hitting or a striking motion. Given the task of placing a known object outside of ...

2023

Geometric and Learning Methods for Robots to Navigate in Human Crowds with Application to Smart Mobility Devices

David Julian Gonon

The thesis at hand is concerned with robots' navigation in human crowds. Specifically, methods are developed for planning a mobile robot's local motion between pedestrians, and they are evaluated in experiments where a robot interacts with real pedestrians ...

EPFL2023

Hybrid Quadratic Programming - Pullback Bundle Dynamical Systems Control

Aude Billard, Bernardo Fichera

Dynamical System (DS)-based closed-loop control is a simple and effective way to generate reactive motion policies that well generalize to the robotic workspace, while retaining stability guarantees. Lately the formalism has been expanded in order to handl ...

SPRINGER INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING AG2023

Reinforcement learning for scaffold-free construction of spanning-structures

Maryam Kamgarpour, Stefana Parascho, Gabriel Rémi Vallat, Anna Maria Maddux, Jingwen Wang

In construction robotics, a conventional design-to-fabrication work-flow starts with designing a structure, followed by task and robotic motion planning, and ultimately, fabrication. However, this approach can prove unsuccessful, as we may only discover th ...

New York2023

Inverse Reinforcement Learning of Pedestrian-Robot Coordination

Aude Billard, David Julian Gonon

We apply inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) with a novel cost feature to the problem of robot navigation in human crowds. Consistent with prior empirical work on pedestrian behavior, the feature anticipates collisions between agents. We efficiently learn ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2023

Perspective Aware Road Obstacle Detection

Pascal Fua, Mathieu Salzmann, Krzysztof Maciej Lis, Sina Honari

While road obstacle detection techniques have become increasingly effective, they typically ignore the fact that, in practice, the apparent size of the obstacles decreases as their distance to the vehicle increases. In this letter, we account for this by c ...

2023

Towards Efficient Gas Leak Detection in Built Environments: Data-Driven Plume Modeling for Gas Sensing Robots

Alcherio Martinoli, Chiara Ercolani, Wanting Jin, Faezeh Rahbar

The deployment of robots for Gas Source Lo- calization (GSL) tasks in hazardous scenarios significantly reduces the risk to humans and animals. Gas sensing using mobile robots focuses primarily on simplified scenarios, due to the complexity of gas dispersi ...

2023

Avian-Inspired Claws Enable Robot Perching or Walking

Dario Floreano, Won Dong Shin, William John Stewart, Mohammad Askari

Multimodal unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are rarely capable of more than two modalities, i.e., flying and walking or flying and perching. However, being able to fly, perch, and walk could further improve their usefulness by expanding their operating enve ...

2023

Robots' Motion Planning in Human Crowds by Acceleration Obstacles

Aude Billard, Diego Felipe Paez Granados, David Julian Gonon

We study the Acceleration Obstacle (AO) as a concept to enable a robot's navigation in human crowds. The AO's geometric properties are analyzed and a direct sampling-free algorithm is proposed to approximate its boundary by linear constraints. The resultin ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2022

Navigation of Concentric Tube Continuum Robots using Optimal Control

John Maddocks, Siva Prasad Chakri Dhanakoti

Recently developed Concentric Tube Continuum Robots (CTCRs) are widely exploited in, for example in minimally invasive surgeries which involve navigating inside narrow body cavities close to sensitive regions. These CTCRs can be controlled by extending and ...

SCITEPRESS2022

Locally active globally stable dynamical systems: Theory, learning, and experiments

Aude Billard, Nadia Barbara Figueroa Fernandez

State-dependent dynamical systems (DSs) offer adaptivity, reactivity, and robustness to perturbations in motion planning and physical human-robot interaction tasks. Learning DS-based motion plans from non-linear reference trajectories is an active research ...

SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD2022

Memory of Motion for Initializing Optimization in Robotics

Teguh Santoso Lembono

Many robotics problems are formulated as optimization problems. However, most optimization solvers in robotics are locally optimal and the performance depends a lot on the initial guess. For challenging problems, the solver will often get stuck at poor loc ...

EPFL2022

VIO-UWB-Based Collaborative Localization and Dense Scene Reconstruction within Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Systems

Fabrizio Schiano

Effective collaboration in multi-robot systems requires accurate and robust estimation of relative localization: from cooperative manipulation to collaborative sensing, and including cooperative exploration or cooperative transportation. This paper introdu ...

IEEE2022