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Outstanding Deployed Systems Paper Award at IEEE ICRA 2022

5/27/2022

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We received the IEEE ICRA2022 Outstanding Deployed Systems Paper Award for our work on "Autonomous Teamed Exploration of Subterranean Environments using Legged and Aerial Robots"! The work is in collaboration with our amazing colleagues from Robotic Systems Lab (Marco Hutter) and Autonomous Systems Lab (Roland Siegwart). Special congratulations to the first two authors Mihir Dharmadhikari and Mihir Kulkarni!
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Team CERBERUS wins the DARPA Subterranean Challenge!

9/27/2021

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Team CERBERUS won the DARPA Subterranean Challenge and a $2,000,000 prize reward that comes along! Team CERBERUS is an international consortium involving the University of Nevada Reno (UNR), ETH Zurich, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), University of California Berkeley, University of Oxford, Flyability, and Sierra Nevada Corporation. The Team Leader is Prof. Dr. Kostas Alexis - director of the Autonomous Robots Lab at NTNU (who was before at UNR when the grant was acquired). The team leadership further involves Prof. Dr. Marco Hutter (Robotic Systems Lab, ETH Zurich), Prof. Dr. Roland Siegwart (Autonomous Systems Lab, ETH Zurich), Prof. Dr. Mark Mueller (UC Berkeley), Prof. Dr. Maurice Fallon (Oxford), Adrien Briod (Flyability), Prof. Dr. Eelke Folmer (UNR),  and Sierra Nevada Corporation’s company leaders. 

CERBERUS stands for “CollaborativE walking & flying RoBots for autonomous ExploRation in Underground Settings” and throughout the three years of the project developed a team of legged and aerial robots capable of autonomously exploring diverse subterranean environments such as underground mines and tunnels, metropolitan sub-surface infrastructure, and natural cave networks. After successfully going through the Tunnel Circuit and the Urban Circuit of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge, Team CERBERUS qualified for the Final Event (the “Cave Circuit” planned for early 2020 was canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic). 

In the Final Event, DARPA designed an environment involving branches representing all three challenges of the “Tunnel Circuit”, the “Urban Circuit” and the “Cave Circuit”. Robots had to explore, search for objects (“artifacts”) of interest, and report their accurate location within underground tunnels, infrastructure similar to a subway, and natural caves and paths with extremely confined geometries, tough terrain, and severe visual degradation (including dense smoke). 

Team CERBERUS deployed a diverse set of robots with the prime systems being four ANYmal C legged systems. In the Prize Round of the Final Event, the team won the competition and scored 23 points by correctly detecting and localizing 23 of 40 of the artifacts DARPA had placed inside the environment. The second team, “CSIRO Data61” also scored 23 points but reported the last artifact with a slight further delay to DARPA thus the tiebraker was in favor of Team CERBERUS. The third team, “MARBLE” scored 18 points. 

The DARPA Subterranean Challenge was one of the rare types of global robotic competition events pushing the frontiers for resilient autonomy and calling teams to develop novel and innovative solutions with the capacity to help critical sectors such as search and rescue personnel and the industry in domains such as mining and beyond. The level of achievement of Team CERBERUS is best understood by looking at all the competitors in the “Systems Competition” of the Final Event. The participating teams including members from top international institutions, namely:
  • CERBERUS (Score = 23): University of Nevada, Reno, ETH Zurich, NTNU, University of California Berkeley, Oxford Robotics Institute, Flyability, Sierra Nevada Corporation
  • CSIRO Data61 (Score = 23): CSIRO, Emesent, Georgia Institute of Technology
  • MARBLE (Score = 18): University of Colorado Boulder, University of Colorado Denver, Scientific Systems Company, University of California Santa Cruz
  • Explorer (Score = 17): Carnegie Mellon University, Oregon State University
  • CoSTAR (Score = 13): NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, MIT, KAIST, Lulea University of Technology
  • CTU-CRAS-NORLAB (Score = 7): Czech Technological University, Université Laval
  • Coordinated Robotics (Score = 2): Coordinated Robotics, California State University Channel Islands, Oke Onwuka, Sequoia Middle School
  • Robotika (Score = 2): Robotika International, Robotika.cz, Czech University of Life Science, Centre for Field Robotics, Cogito Team

We congratulate all members of Team CERBERUS and we are proud of this incredible and historic achievement! Most importantly, we are excited to be part of this amazing community pushing the frontier of resilient robotic autonomy in extreme environments. 

Below a video from our legged robots exploring the SubT Final Event environment:

The video below allows to best understand how the autonomous exploration of our team works:
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IEEE ICRA 2021 Paper Presentations

6/1/2021

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Below the presentations for our 5 IEEE ICRA 2021 papers: 
  • Mihir Rahul Dharmadhikari, Harshal Deshpande, Tung Dang, Kostas Alexis, "Hypergame-based Adaptive Behavior Path Planning for Combined Exploration and Visual Search", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 30-June 5, 2021, Xi'an China
  • Paolo De Petris, Dinh Huan Nguyen, Mihir Kulkarni, Frank Mascarich, Kostas Alexis, "Resilient Collision-tolerant Navigation in Confined Environments", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 30-June 5, 2021, Xi'an China​
  • Frank Mascarich, Paolo De Petris, Dinh Huan Nguyen, Nikhil Vijay Khedekar, Kostas Alexis, "Autonomous Distributed 3D Radiation Field Estimation for Nuclear Environment Characterization", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 30-June 5, 2021, Xi'an China​
  • Dinh Huan Nguyen, Kostas Alexis, "Forceful Aerial Manipulation based on an Aerial Robotic Chain: Hybrid Modeling and Control", IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters with IEEE ICRA 2021 presentation
  • Ran Duan, Changhong Fu, Kostas Alexis, Erdal Kayacan, "Online Recommendation-based Convolutional Features for Scale-Aware Visual Tracking", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 30-June 5, 2021, Xi'an China
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5 Papers and 2 Workshops at IEEE ICRA 2021

2/28/2021

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​Our lab got 5 IEEE ICRA papers (one of which with RA-L journal option). Congratulations to all the team members and collaborators for this great result! We will present the following contributions: 
  • Mihir Rahul Dharmadhikari, Harshal Deshpande, Tung Dang, Kostas Alexis, "Hypergame-based Adaptive Behavior Path Planning for Combined Exploration and Visual Search", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 30-June 5, 2021, Xi'an China
  • Paolo De Petris, Dinh Huan Nguyen, Mihir Kulkarni, Frank Mascarich, Kostas Alexis, "Resilient Collision-tolerant Navigation in Confined Environments", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 30-June 5, 2021, Xi'an China​
  • Frank Mascarich, Paolo De Petris, Dinh Huan Nguyen, Nikhil Vijay Khedekar, Kostas Alexis, "Autonomous Distributed 3D Radiation Field Estimation for Nuclear Environment Characterization", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 30-June 5, 2021, Xi'an China​
  • Dinh Huan Nguyen, Kostas Alexis, "Forceful Aerial Manipulation based on an Aerial Robotic Chain: Hybrid Modeling and Control", IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters with IEEE ICRA 2021 presentation
  • Ran Duan, Changhong Fu, Kostas Alexis, Erdal Kayacan, "Online Recommendation-based Convolutional Features for Scale-Aware Visual Tracking", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 30-June 5, 2021, Xi'an China​
In addition we co-organize the following exciting workshops:
  • Resilient and Long-Term Autonomy for Aerial Robotic Systems - Organizers: Anibal Ollero, Giuseppe Loianno, Kimon Valavanis, Ivana Palunko, Kostas Alexis, Shaojie Shen
  • Robust Perception For Autonomous Field Robots in Challenging Environments - Organizers: Andrew Kramer, Christoffer Heckman, Ali-akbar Agha-mohammadi, Margarita Chli, Luca Carlone, Kostas Alexis

Videos from some of our papers follow:
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ICRA 2021 Workshops on Resilient Autonomy for Aerial Robots and Robust Perception in Challenging Environments

2/10/2021

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We are co-organizing two IEEE ICRA 2021 workshops on the following topics:
  • Resilient and Long-Term Autonomy for Aerial Robotic Systems - Organizers: Anibal Ollero, Giuseppe Loianno, Kimon Valavanis, Ivana Palunko, Kostas Alexis, Shaojie Shen
  • Robust Perception For Autonomous Field Robots in Challenging Environments - Organizers: Andrew Kramer, Christoffer Heckman, Ali-akbar Agha-mohammadi, Margarita Chli, Luca Carlone, Kostas Alexis
​Looking forward to your participation and the exciting discussion! 
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New NSF Grant on Collision-tolerant Autonomous Navigation

8/13/2020

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Our lab was awarded a new NSF core grant on learning autonomous flight behaviors that exploit collision-tolerance on specially designed flying robots. 

Grant details:

RI: Small: Learning Resilient Autonomous Flight Behaviors by Exploiting Collision-tolerance - this NSF grant emphasizes on survivable autonomous navigation of collision-tolerant flying robots exploiting both rigid and compliant designs as well as hybrid systems-based reinforcement learning methods. Funding: $389,634. Principal Investigator: Kostas. Project Period: 10/01/2020-09/30/2023. Award Number: ​2008904
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ARL at ICRA2020 Virtual Conference

5/30/2020

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This year's ICRA is different! The major robotics conference has moved fully virtual due to the Covid19 pandemic. Below please find information on our presence in the conference. 

Session: Aerial Systems: Applications I
09:30-09:45, Paper MoA05.2  
Motion Primitives-Based Path Planning for Fast and Agile Exploration Using Aerial Robots
Authors: ​Mihir Rahul Dharmadhikari, Tung Dang, Lukas Solanka, Johannes Brakker Loje, Dinh Huan Nguyen, Nikhil Vijay Khedekar, and Kostas Alexis
Slack Channel: https://icra20.slack.com/app_redirect?channel=moa05_2
​Presentation Video:

Session: Aerial Systems: Applications II
11:30-11:45, Paper MoB05.2  
Learning-Based Path Planning for Autonomous Exploration of Subterranean Environments
Authors: Russell Reinhart, Tung Dang, Emily Hand, Christos Papachristos, and Kostas Alexis
Slack Channel: ​https://icra20.slack.com/app_redirect?channel=mob05_2 
​Presentation Video: 

Session: Aerial Systems: Mechanics and Control II
11:45-12:00, Paper TuB05.3  
The Reconfigurable Aerial Robotic Chain: Modeling and Control
Authors: ​Dinh Huan Nguyen, Tung Dang, and Kostas Alexis​
Slack channel: 
https://icra20.slack.com/app_redirect?channel=tub05_3
​Presentation Video: ​
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IEEE AEROCONF Best Paper Award

3/14/2020

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Our paper:
  • K. Alexis, "Lévy Flight Foraging Hypothesis-based Autonomous Large-scale Memoryless Search under Sparse Rewards", IEEE Aerospace Conference (AeroConf) 2019, Yellowstone Conference, Big Sky, Montana, Mar 7-14, 2020
Got the  Best Paper Award in the "Air Vehicle Systems and Technologies" Track. 
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IFAC2020 Paper Accepted

3/10/2020

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Our paper:
  • Mihir Kulkarni, Nguyen Dinh Huan, Kostas Alexis, "The Reconfigurable Aerial Robotic Chain: Shape and Motion Planning", IFAC 2020 World Congress, Berlin, Germany, July 12-17, 2020
Got accepted. The video below allows for better understanding. 
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ICRA 2020 Papers Accepted

1/21/2020

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Our lab got 3 papers accepted at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2020 Conference to take place in Paris, France. We will present the following contributions:
  • Mihir Rahul Dharmadhikari, Tung Dang, Lukas Solanka, Johannes Brakker Loje, Dinh Huan Nguyen, Nikhil Vijay Khedekar, and Kostas Alexis, "Motion Primitives-based Path Planning for Fast and Agile Exploration using Aerial Robots", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2020, May 31 - June 4 2020, Paris, France.
  • Russell Reinhart*, Tung Dang, Emily Hand, Christos Papachristos, and Kostas Alexis, "Learning-based Path Planning for Autonomous Exploration of Subterranean Environments", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2020, May 31 - June 4 2020, Paris, France.
  • Dinh Huan Nguyen, Tung Dang, and Kostas Alexis, "The Reconfigurable Aerial Robotic Chain: Modeling and Control", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2020, May 31 - June 4 2020, Paris, France.
Below we provide results from the relevant experimental evaluation studies.

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