Explanipedia

Heterogeneous Robot Collaboration in Unstructured Environments with Grounded Generative Intelligence Open

Zachary Ravichandran, Fernando Cladera, Ankit Prabhu, Jason Hughes, Varun Murali , et al. · 2025

Heterogeneous robot teams operating in realistic settings often must accomplish complex missions requiring collaboration and adaptation to information acquired online. Because robot teams frequently operate in unstructured environments -- …

Real-Time Glass Detection and Reprojection using Sensor Fusion Onboard Aerial Robots Open

Mitchell W. Hopkins, Varun Murali, Vijay Kumar, Camillo J. Taylor · 2025

Autonomous aerial robots are increasingly being deployed in real-world scenarios, where transparent obstacles present significant challenges to reliable navigation and mapping. These materials pose a unique problem for traditional percepti…

Air-Ground Collaboration for Language-Specified Missions in Unknown Environments Open

Fernando Cladera, Zachary Ravichandran, Jason Hughes, Varun Murali, Carlos Nieto-Granda , et al. · 2025

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 intuitive medium for such mission specification. However, r…

Deploying Foundation Model-Enabled Air and Ground Robots in the Field: Challenges and Opportunities Open

Zachary Ravichandran, Fernando Cladera, Jason Hughes, Varun Murali, M. Ani Hsieh , et al. · 2025

The integration of foundation models (FMs) into robotics has enabled robots to understand natural language and reason about the semantics in their environments. However, existing FM-enabled robots primary operate in closed-world settings, …

ATLAS Navigator: Active Task-driven LAnguage-embedded Gaussian Splatting Open

Dexter Ong, Varun Murali, Igor Spasojevic, Pratik Chaudhari · 2025

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 real time. Since tasks may require clarification or re-specifi…

Learning autonomous driving from aerial imagery Open

Varun Murali, Guy Rosman, Sertaç Karaman, Daniela Rus · 2024

In this work, we consider the problem of learning end to end perception to control for ground vehicles solely from aerial imagery. Photogrammetric simulators allow the synthesis of novel views through the transformation of pre-generated as…

SPINE: Online Semantic Planning for Missions with Incomplete Natural Language Specifications in Unstructured Environments Open

Zachary Ravichandran, Varun Murali, Mariliza Tzes, George J. Pappas, Vijay Kumar · 2024

As robots become increasingly capable, users will want to describe high-level missions and have robots infer the relevant details. Because pre-built maps are difficult to obtain in many realistic settings, accomplishing such missions will …

RT-GuIDE: Real-Time Gaussian Splatting for Information-Driven Exploration Open

Yuezhan Tao, Dexter Ong, Varun Murali, Igor Spasojevic, Pratik Chaudhari , et al. · 2024

We propose a framework for active mapping and exploration that leverages Gaussian splatting for constructing dense maps. Further, we develop a GPU-accelerated motion planning algorithm that can exploit the Gaussian map for real-time naviga…

AgriNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Agriculture in Challenging Lighting Conditions Open

Samarth Chopra, Fernando Cladera, Varun Murali, Vijay Kumar · 2024

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, providing critical information about fruit detection for yield e…

Challenges and Opportunities for Large-Scale Exploration with Air-Ground Teams using Semantics Open

Fernando Cladera, Ian D. Miller, Zachary Ravichandran, Varun Murali, Jason Hughes , et al. · 2024

One common and desirable application of robots is exploring potentially hazardous and unstructured environments. Air-ground collaboration offers a synergistic approach to addressing such exploration challenges. In this paper, we demonstrat…

A Planted Clique Perspective on Hypothesis Pruning Open

Muyuan Lin, Varun Murali, Sertaç Karaman · 2022

Hypothesis pruning is an important prerequisite while working with outlier-contaminated data in many computer vision problems. However, the underlying random data structures are barely explored in the literature, limiting designing efficie…

FlightGoggles: Photorealistic Sensor Simulation for Perception-driven Robotics using Photogrammetry and Virtual Reality Open

Winter Guerra, Ezra Tal, Varun Murali, Gilhyun Ryou, Sertaç Karaman · 2021

© 2019 IEEE. FlightGoggles is a photorealistic sensor simulator for perception-driven robotic vehicles. The key contributions of FlightGoggles are twofold. First, FlightGoggles provides photorealistic exteroceptive sensor simulation using …

Perception-aware time optimal path parameterization for quadrotors Open

Igor Spasojevic, Varun Murali, Sertaç Karaman · 2020

The increasing popularity of quadrotors has given rise to a class of predominantly vision-driven vehicles. This paper addresses the problem of perception-aware time optimal path parametrization for quadrotors. Although many different choic…

The Blackbird Dataset: A Large-Scale Dataset for UAV Perception in Aggressive Flight Open

Amado Antonini, Winter Guerra, Varun Murali, Thomas Sayre-McCord, Sertaç Karaman · 2020

Asymptotic Optimality of a Time Optimal Path Parametrization Algorithm Open

Igor Spasojevic, Varun Murali, Sertaç Karaman · 2019

Time Optimal Path Parametrization is the problem of minimizing the time interval during which an actuation constrained agent can traverse a given path. Recently, an efficient linear-time algorithm for solving this problem was proposed. How…

FlightGoggles: A Modular Framework for Photorealistic Camera, Exteroceptive Sensor, and Dynamics Simulation Open

Winter Guerra, Ezra Tal, Varun Murali, Gilhyun Ryou, Sertaç Karaman · 2019

FlightGoggles is a photorealistic sensor simulator for perception-driven robotic vehicles. The key contributions of FlightGoggles are twofold. First, FlightGoggles provides photorealistic exteroceptive sensor simulation using graphics asse…

The Blackbird Dataset: A large-scale dataset for UAV perception in\n aggressive flight Open

Amado Antonini, Winter Guerra, Varun Murali, Thomas Sayre-McCord, Sertaç Karaman · 2018

The Blackbird unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) dataset is a large-scale,\naggressive indoor flight dataset collected using a custom-built quadrotor\nplatform for use in evaluation of agile perception.Inspired by the potential of\nfuture high-…

User oriented assessment of vibration suppression by command shaping in a supernumerary wearable robotic arm Open

Roozbeh Khodambashi, Gil Weinberg, William Singhose, Shima Rishmawi, Varun Murali , et al. · 2018

Supernumerary Robotic Limbs (SRLs) exhibit inherently compliant behavior due to the elasticity present at the intersection of human tissue and the robot. This compliance, can prominently influence the operation of some SRLs, depending on t…

Augmented Reality Driving Using Semantic Geo-Registration Open

Han-Pang Chiu, Varun Murali, Ryan Villamil, G. Drew Kessler, Supun Samarasekera , et al. · 2018

We propose a new approach that utilizes semantic information to register 2D monocular video frames to the world using 3D geo-referenced data, for augmented reality driving applications. The geo-registration process uses our predicted vehic…

Utilizing Semantic Visual Landmarks for Precise Vehicle Navigation Open

Varun Murali, Han-Pang Chiu, Supun Samarasekera, Rakesh Rakesh, Kumar · 2018

This paper presents a new approach for integrating semantic information for vision-based vehicle navigation. Although vision-based vehicle navigation systems using pre-mapped visual landmarks are capable of achieving submeter level accurac…

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