Sotirios Athanasoulias, Andy Philippides
Inspired by the navigational behavior observed in the animal kingdom and especially the navigational behavior of the ants, we attempt to simulate it in an artificial environment by implementing different kinds of biomimetic algorithms.
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Real-time autonomous magnetic microrobot navigation across dynamic and biologically relevant environments
针对血管内微机器人导航面临密集移动障碍的挑战，提出结合解析几何全局规划器与两种局部逃逸控制器的实时路径规划框架，实现快速避障并到达目标，平均规划时间40毫秒/帧。
Autonomous Systems: Autonomous Systems: Indoor Drone Navigation
本文利用 Gazebo、Navigation2 和 SLAM Toolbox 构建了一个可在无 GPS 室内环境中自主导航的模拟四旋翼无人机，填补了 Nav2 在无人机领域应用的空白。
AUTONAV: A Toolfor Autonomous Navigation of Robots
该研究提出工具AUTONAV以自动化机器人自主导航的建图、定位与路径规划任务，其模块化架构支持多算法集成比较，并在室内仿真场景验证了其生成地图与路径规划的能力。
Learning agents can optimize standard autonomous navigation improving flexibility, efficiency, and computational cost of the system by adopting a wide variety of approaches. This work introduces the \textit{PIC4rl-gym}, a fundamental modular framework to enhance navigation and learning research by mixing ROS2 and Gazebo, the standard tools of the robotics community, with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). The paper describes the whole structure of the PIC4rl-gym, which fully integrates DRL agent's training and testing in several indoor and outdoor navigation scenarios and tasks. A modular appr…
In densely populated environments, socially compliant navigation is critical for autonomous robots as driving close to people is unavoidable. This manner of social navigation is challenging given the constraints of human comfort and social rules. Traditional methods based on hand-craft cost functions to achieve this task have difficulties to operate in the complex real world. Other learning-based approaches fail to address the naturalness aspect from the perspective of collective formation behaviors. We present an autonomous navigation system capable of operating in dense crowds and utilizing …
Benchmarking Reinforcement Learning Techniques for Autonomous Navigation
本文针对自主导航深度强化学习缺乏开源基准和可复现方法的问题，提出了四个主要期望，并评估了记忆架构、安全RL、基于模型RL和域随机化四类技术在开源基准和真实环境中的表现。
The purpose of navigation is to determine the position, velocity, and orientation of manned and autonomous platforms, humans, and animals. Obtaining accurate navigation commonly requires fusion between several sensors, such as inertial sensors and global navigation satellite systems, in a model-based, nonlinear estimation framework. Recently, data-driven approaches applied in various fields show state-of-the-art performance, compared to model-based methods. In this paper we review multidisciplinary, data-driven based navigation algorithms developed and experimentally proven at the Autonomous N…
We present a semantically rich graph representation for indoor robotic navigation. Our graph representation encodes: semantic locations such as offices or corridors as nodes, and navigational behaviors such as enter office or cross a corridor as edges. In particular, our navigational behaviors operate directly from visual inputs to produce motor controls and are implemented with deep learning architectures. This enables the robot to avoid explicit computation of its precise location or the geometry of the environment, and enables navigation at a higher level of semantic abstraction. We evaluat…
This paper presents a deep learning approach to aid dead-reckoning (DR) navigation using a limited sensor suite. A Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) was developed to predict the relative horizontal velocities of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) using data from an IMU, pressure sensor, and control inputs. The RNN network is trained using experimental data, where a doppler velocity logger (DVL) provided ground truth velocities. The predictions of the relative velocities were implemented in a dead-reckoning algorithm to approximate north and east positions. The studies in this paper were twofo…
Aerial navigation in GPS-denied, indoor environments, is still an open challenge. Drones can perceive the environment from a richer set of viewpoints, while having more stringent compute and energy constraints than other autonomous platforms. To tackle that problem, this research displays a biologically inspired deep-learning algorithm for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and its application in a drone navigation system. We propose an unsupervised representation learning method that yields low-dimensional latent state descriptors, that mitigates the sensitivity to perceptual aliasi…
Precision agriculture is rapidly attracting research to efficiently introduce automation and robotics solutions to support agricultural activities. Robotic navigation in vineyards and orchards offers competitive advantages in autonomously monitoring and easily accessing crops for harvesting, spraying and performing time-consuming necessary tasks. Nowadays, autonomous navigation algorithms exploit expensive sensors which also require heavy computational cost for data processing. Nonetheless, vineyard rows represent a challenging outdoor scenario where GPS and Visual Odometry techniques often st…
Navigating the world is a fundamental ability for any living entity. Accomplishing the same degree of freedom in technology has proven to be difficult. The brain is the only known mechanism capable of voluntary navigation, making neuroscience our best source of inspiration toward autonomy. Assuming that state representation is key, we explore the difference in how the brain and the machine represent the navigational state. Where Reinforcement Learning (RL) requires a monolithic state representation in accordance with the Markov property, Neural Representation of Euclidean Space (NRES) reflects…
Social navigation research is performed on a variety of robotic platforms, scenarios, and environments. Making comparisons between navigation algorithms is challenging because of the effort involved in building these systems and the diversity of platforms used by the community; nonetheless, evaluation is critical to understanding progress in the field. In a step towards reproducible evaluation of social navigation algorithms, we propose the Social Environment for Autonomous Navigation (SEAN). SEAN is a high visual fidelity, open source, and extensible social navigation simulation platform whic…
Hierarchical Decision-Making for Autonomous Navigation: Integrating Deep Reinforcement Learning and Fuzzy Logic in Four-Wheel Independent Steering and Driving Systems
本文提出一种面向四轮独立转向与驱动系统的分层决策框架，融合深度强化学习进行高层导航和模糊逻辑进行低层控制，在仿真与真实工业场景中验证了其优于传统方法及纯DRL方案的训练效率、稳定性和安全性。
Evaluation of Safety Constraints in Autonomous Navigation with Deep Reinforcement Learning
本研究比较了考虑与不考虑安全约束的两种深度强化学习导航策略，证明安全策略能在不牺牲整体性能的前提下生成间隙更大、碰撞更少的轨迹。
SAATT Nav: a Socially Aware Autonomous Transparent Transportation Navigation Framework for Wheelchairs
本文提出SAATT导航框架，通过整合大语言模型实现社交感知与决策透明，提升轮椅用户的导航安全性与信任度。
This paper presents an implementation of autonomous navigation functionality based on Robot Operating System (ROS) on a wheeled differential drive mobile platform called Eddie robot. ROS is a framework that contains many reusable software stacks as well as visualization and debugging tools that provides an ideal environment for any robotic project development. The main contribution of this paper is the description of the customized hardware and software system setup of Eddie robot to work with an autonomous navigation system in ROS called Navigation Stack and to implement one application use c…
Urban environments offer a challenging scenario for autonomous driving. Globally localizing information, such as a GPS signal, can be unreliable due to signal shadowing and multipath errors. Detailed a priori maps of the environment with sufficient information for autonomous navigation typically require driving the area multiple times to collect large amounts of data, substantial post-processing on that data to obtain the map, and then maintaining updates on the map as the environment changes. This dissertation addresses the issue of autonomous driving in an urban environment by investigating …
A Deep Learning Driven Algorithmic Pipeline for Autonomous Navigation in Row-Based Crops
本文提出一种基于深度学习的行播作物自主导航算法流水线，利用低量程传感器和占据栅格地图生成可行路径，有效应对GNSS不可靠问题，实现高性价比的完全自主机器。
Inspection and maintenance are two crucial aspects of industrial pipeline plants. While robotics has made tremendous progress in the mechanic design of in-pipe inspection robots, the autonomous control of such robots is still a big open challenge due to the high number of actuators and the complex manoeuvres required. To address this problem, we investigate the usage of Deep Reinforcement Learning for achieving autonomous navigation of in-pipe robots in pipeline networks with complex topologies. Moreover, we introduce a hierarchical policy decomposition based on Hierarchical Reinforcement Lear…
Precision agriculture is a fast-growing field that aims at introducing affordable and effective automation into agricultural processes. Nowadays, algorithmic solutions for navigation in vineyards require expensive sensors and high computational workloads that preclude large-scale applicability of autonomous robotic platforms in real business case scenarios. From this perspective, our novel proposed control leverages the latest advancement in machine perception and edge AI techniques to achieve highly affordable and reliable navigation inside vineyard rows with low computational and power consu…
Recently, mobile robots have become important tools in various industries, especially in logistics. Deep reinforcement learning emerged as an alternative planning method to replace overly conservative approaches and promises more efficient and flexible navigation. However, deep reinforcement learning approaches are not suitable for long-range navigation due to their proneness to local minima and lack of long term memory, which hinders its widespread integration into industrial applications of mobile robotics. In this paper, we propose a navigation system incorporating deep-reinforcement-learni…
Urban environments offer a challenging scenario for autonomous driving. Globally localizing information, such as a GPS signal, can be unreliable due to signal shadowing and multipath errors. Detailed a priori maps of the environment with sufficient information for autonomous navigation typically require driving the area multiple times to collect large amounts of data, substantial post-processing on that data to obtain the map, and then maintaining updates on the map as the environment changes. This paper addresses the issue of autonomous driving in an urban environment by investigating algorit…
We are interested in the design of autonomous robot behaviors that learn the preferences of users over continued interactions, with the goal of efficiently executing navigation behaviors in a way that the user expects. In this paper, we discuss our work in progress to modify a general model for robot navigation behaviors in an exploration task on a per-user basis using preference-based reinforcement learning. The novel contribution of this approach is that it combines reinforcement learning, motion planning, and natural language processing to allow an autonomous agent to learn from sustained d…
MulDP: Multimodal Diffusion Policy for Autonomous Quadruped Parkour Navigation across Complex Terrains
本文针对四足机器人自主跑酷导航的关键挑战，提出MulDP多模态扩散策略，构建QPND数据集，经仿真与真实实验验证其可实现复杂地形的长时程鲁棒自主导航。
CropNav: a Framework for Autonomous Navigation in Real Farms
提出一种混合导航系统CropNav，通过在LiDAR行跟踪与航点跟踪间自动切换并实现失败检测与恢复，解决了冠层下GNSS不可靠的导航难题，显著提升了农场自主导航距离。
Autonomous navigation has become an increasingly popular machine learning application. Recent advances in deep learning have also resulted in great improvements to autonomous navigation. However, prior outdoor autonomous navigation depends on various expensive sensors or large amounts of real labeled data which is difficult to acquire and sometimes erroneous. The objective of this study is to train an autonomous navigation model that uses a simulator (instead of real labeled data) and an inexpensive monocular camera. In order to exploit the simulator satisfactorily, our proposed method is base…
Autonomous navigation is a long-standing field of robotics research, which provides an essential capability for mobile robots to execute a series of tasks on the same environments performed by human everyday. In this chapter, we present a set of algorithms to train and deploy deep networks for autonomous navigation of mobile robots using the Robot Operation System (ROS). We describe three main steps to tackle this problem: i) collecting data in simulation environments using ROS and Gazebo; ii) designing deep network for autonomous navigation, and iii) deploying the learned policy on mobile rob…
While effective navigation in large, crowded environments is essential for an autonomous robot, preliminary testing of algorithms to support it requires simulation across a broad range of crowd scenarios. Most available simulation tools provide either realistic crowds without robots or realistic robots without realistic crowds. This paper introduces MengeROS, a 2-D simulator that realistically integrates multiple robots and crowds. MengeROS provides a broad range of settings in which to test the capabilities and performance of navigation algorithms designed for large crowded environments.
VascularPilot3D: Toward a 3D fully autonomous navigation for endovascular robotics
VascularPilot3D是首个三维全自主血管内机器人导航系统，结合感知与规划模块，在离体实验中达到100%成功率，并减少18.38%人工控制。
The field of autonomous mobile robots has undergone dramatic advancements over the past decades. Despite achieving important milestones, several challenges are yet to be addressed. Aggregating the achievements of the robotic community as survey papers is vital to keep the track of current state-of-the-art and the challenges that must be tackled in the future. This paper tries to provide a comprehensive review of autonomous mobile robots covering topics such as sensor types, mobile robot platforms, simulation tools, path planning and following, sensor fusion methods, obstacle avoidance, and SLA…
End-to-end learning for autonomous navigation has received substantial attention recently as a promising method for reducing modeling error. However, its data complexity, especially around generalization to unseen environments, is high. We introduce a novel image-based autonomous navigation technique that leverages in policy structure using the Riemannian Motion Policy (RMP) framework for deep learning of vehicular control. We design a deep neural network to predict control point RMPs of the vehicle from visual images, from which the optimal control commands can be computed analytically. We sh…
Autonomous navigation in complex environments is a crucial task in time-sensitive scenarios such as disaster response or search and rescue. However, complex environments pose significant challenges for autonomous platforms to navigate due to their challenging properties: constrained narrow passages, unstable pathway with debris and obstacles, or irregular geological structures and poor lighting conditions. In this work, we propose a multimodal fusion approach to address the problem of autonomous navigation in complex environments such as collapsed cites, or natural caves. We first simulate the…
In this paper, a method for low-cost system design oriented to indoor and outdoor autonomous navigation is illustrated. In order to provide a motivation for the solution here presented, a brief discussion of the typical drawbacks of state-of-the-art technologies is reported. Finally, an application of such a method for the design of a navigation system for blindfolded people is shown.
Towards Autonomous Navigation in Endovascular Interventions
本研究提出AI驱动框架，通过高保真模拟和多模态传感融合提升内窥血管导航的自主性和精度，推动微创手术的发展。
Path planning and obstacle avoidance are the two major issues in any navigation system. Wavefront propagation algorithm, as a good path planner, can be used to determine an optimal path. Obstacle avoidance can be achieved using possibility theory. Combining these two functions enable a robot to autonomously navigate to its destination. This paper presents the approach and results in implementing an autonomous navigation system for an indoor mobile robot. The system developed is based on a laser sensor used to retrieve data to update a two dimensional world model of therobot environment. Waypoi…
Autonomous Mobile Robot Navigation: Tracking problem
本研究针对自主移动机器人导航跟踪问题，研究里程计、目标跟踪、避障三类核心行为，结合仿真与真实环境（含Pioneer、Elegoo机器人平台）完成验证，为鲁棒导航系统开发提供参考。
In recent years, simultaneous magnetic actuation and localization (SMAL) for active wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) has been intensively studied to improve the efficiency and accuracy of the examination. In this paper, we propose an autonomous magnetic navigation framework for active WCE that mimics the "insertion" and "withdrawal" procedures performed by an expert physician in conventional colonoscopy, thereby enabling efficient and accurate navigation of a robotic capsule endoscope in the intestine with minimal user effort. First, the capsule is automatically propelled through the unknown i…
Hierarchical end-to-end autonomous navigation through few-shot waypoint detection
提出一种基于少样本航点检测的分层端到端元学习方案，移动机器人仅需少量地标图像即可在未知环境中导航，并经室内自主车辆实验验证有效。
Mobile robot navigation is typically regarded as a geometric problem, in which the robot's objective is to perceive the geometry of the environment in order to plan collision-free paths towards a desired goal. However, a purely geometric view of the world can can be insufficient for many navigation problems. For example, a robot navigating based on geometry may avoid a field of tall grass because it believes it is untraversable, and will therefore fail to reach its desired goal. In this work, we investigate how to move beyond these purely geometric-based approaches using a method that learns a…
Towards Over-Canopy Autonomous Navigation: Crop-Agnostic LiDAR-Based Crop-Row Detection in Arable Fields
本文提出一种基于LiDAR的与作物类型无关的冠层上方自主导航系统，可在无GPS条件下检测作物行并导航整个田地，平均横向误差3.55厘米。
Autonomous Navigation in Complex Environments
本文提出基于CNN-DNN融合的导航控制器，利用模仿学习结合LiDAR与相机数据在地下救援仿真环境中导航寻目标，并通过蒙特卡洛验证其鲁棒性。
Fully or partial autonomous marine vessels are actively being developed by many industry actors. In many cases, the autonomous vessels will be operating close to shore, and within range of a Remote Control Center (RCC). Close to shore operation requires that the autonomous vessel is able to navigate in close proximity to other autonomous or manned vessels, and possibly in confined waters, while obeying the COLREGs on equal terms as any other vessel at sea. In confined waters however, certain COLREGs rules apply, which might alter the expected actions (give-way or stand-on), depending on the ma…
Breakthroughs in machine learning in the last decade have led to `digital intelligence', i.e. machine learning models capable of learning from vast amounts of labeled data to perform several digital tasks such as speech recognition, face recognition, machine translation and so on. The goal of this thesis is to make progress towards designing algorithms capable of `physical intelligence', i.e. building intelligent autonomous navigation agents capable of learning to perform complex navigation tasks in the physical world involving visual perception, natural language understanding, reasoning, plan…
Near-Driven Autonomous Rover Navigation in Complex Environments: Extensions to Urban Search-and-Rescue and Industrial Inspection
本文提出基于NEAT的扩展神经进化方法，在复杂环境中实现自主机器人导航，实验显示成功率约80%且结构适应性优于深度强化学习，适用于消防、城市搜索救援和工业巡检等任务。
Navigation underwater traditionally is done by keeping a safe distance from obstacles, resulting in "fly-overs" of the area of interest. Movement of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) through a cluttered space, such as a shipwreck or a decorated cave, is an extremely challenging problem that has not been addressed in the past. This paper proposes a novel navigation framework utilizing an enhanced version of Trajopt for fast 3D path-optimization planning for AUVs. A sampling-based correction procedure ensures that the planning is not constrained by local minima, enabling navigation through …
Machine learning approaches have recently enabled autonomous navigation for mobile robots in a data-driven manner. Since most existing learning-based navigation systems are trained with data generated in artificially created training environments, during real-world deployment at scale, it is inevitable that robots will encounter unseen scenarios, which are out of the training distribution and therefore lead to poor real-world performance. On the other hand, directly training in the real world is generally unsafe and inefficient. To address this issue, we introduce Self-supervised Environment S…
This paper proposes a Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) architecture for planetary rovers targeting the conditions of upcoming Mars exploration missions such as Mars 2020 and the Sample Fetching Rover (SFR). The navigation requirements of these missions demand a control architecture featuring autonomous capabilities to achieve a fast and long traverse. The proposed solution presents a two-level architecture where the efficient navigation (low) level is always active and the full navigation (upper) level is enabled according to the difficulty of the terrain. The first level is an efficien…
Challenges inherent to autonomous wintertime navigation in forests include lack of reliable a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signal, low feature contrast, high illumination variations and changing environment. This type of off-road environment is an extreme case of situations autonomous cars could encounter in northern regions. Thus, it is important to understand the impact of this harsh environment on autonomous navigation systems. To this end, we present a field report analyzing teach-and-repeat navigation in a subarctic forest while subject to fluctuating weather, including light…
A Map-Free LiDAR-Based System for Autonomous Navigation in Vineyards
本文提出一种基于LiDAR和轮式编码器的无地图导航系统，利用葡萄园平行行结构实现行内、转弯和行端自主导航，并通过行端点检测弥补了现有研究对行端导航的忽视。
Lavender Autonomous Navigation with Semantic Segmentation at the Edge
本研究将基于分割的视觉不可知导航算法应用于薰衣草田，通过仿真和真实场景的大量实验验证了其在不同场景下的泛化能力和高度可靠性。
Autonomous navigation of a robot in agricultural fields is essential for every task from crop monitoring to weed management and fertilizer application. Many current approaches rely on accurate GPS, however, such technology is expensive and also prone to failure (e.g. through lack of coverage). As such, autonomous navigation through sensors that can interpret their environment (such as cameras) is important to achieve the goal of autonomy in agriculture. In this paper, we introduce a purely vision-based navigation scheme that is able to reliably guide the robot through row-crop fields without m…
Enabling Autonomous Navigation in a Snake Robot through Visual-Inertial Odometry and Closed-Loop Trajectory Tracking Control
本研究通过视觉-惯性里程计和闭环轨迹跟踪控制，实现蛇形机器人在无外部跟踪设施环境下的自主导航，验证了多路径点跟踪的准确性。
Autonomous Navigation and Collision Avoidance for Mobile Robots: Classification and Review
本文提出一种针对自主移动机器人自主无碰撞导航的三阶段五步分类法，梳理各阶段主流方法与技术，建立软硬件输入与自主导航的联系，为未来项目提供知识基础。
In this paper, we present a framework for real-time autonomous robot navigation based on cloud and on-demand databases to address two major issues of human-like robot interaction and task planning in global dynamic environment, which is not known a priori. Our framework contributes to make human-like brain GPS mapping system for robot using spatial information and performs 3D visual semantic SLAM for independent robot navigation. We accomplish the feat by separating robot's memory system into Long-Term Memory (LTM) and Short-Term Memory (STM). We also form robot's behavior and knowledge system…
This paper focuses on online occupancy mapping and real-time collision checking onboard an autonomous robot navigating in a large unknown environment. Commonly used voxel and octree map representations can be easily maintained in a small environment but have increasing memory requirements as the environment grows. We propose a fundamentally different approach for occupancy mapping, in which the boundary between occupied and free space is viewed as the decision boundary of a machine learning classifier. This work generalizes a kernel perceptron model which maintains a very sparse set of support…
This paper presents the development of a Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) based Autonomous Navigation system. The motivation for this study was to find a solution for navigating interior spaces autonomously. Interior navigation is challenging as it can be forever evolving. Solving this issue is necessary for multitude of services, like cleaning, the health industry, and in manufacturing industries. The focus of this paper is the description of the SLAM-based software architecture developed for this proposed autonomous system. A potential application of this system, oriented to a sm…
In recent years, Deep Reinforcement Learning emerged as a promising approach for autonomous navigation of ground vehicles and has been utilized in various areas of navigation such as cruise control, lane changing, or obstacle avoidance. However, most research works either focus on providing an end-to-end solution training the whole system using Deep Reinforcement Learning or focus on one specific aspect such as local motion planning. This however, comes along with a number of problems such as catastrophic forgetfulness, inefficient navigation behavior, and non-optimal synchronization between d…
CAVE-NAV: VLM-Based Autonomous 3D Navigation in Underwater Cave Environments
该研究针对水下洞穴导航的传统方法局限，提出带CoT推理的VLM导航框架，经仿真验证可完成无碰撞的端到端三维洞穴导航。
Indoor Localization for Autonomous Robot Navigation
本研究探索将室内定位系统（IPS）用于自主机器人导航，通过收集数据集、训练模型并开发A*路径规划算法，使机器人利用预测方向导航，实验显示约50%的拐角导航成功率，表明该方向具有研究潜力。
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