Publications related to Environmental Monitoring using Autonomous Vehicles: A Survey of Recent Searching Techniques

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

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

Information-Driven Gas Distribution Mapping for Autonomous Mobile Robots

Alcherio Martinoli, Faezeh Rahbar, Chiara Ercolani

The ability to sense airborne pollutants with mobile robots provides a valuable asset for domains such as industrial safety and environmental monitoring. Oftentimes, this involves detecting how certain gases are spread out in the environment, commonly refe ...

MDPI2023

Chaotic microcomb inertia-free parallel ranging

Tobias Kippenberg, Anton Stroganov, Anton Lukashchuk

Ever growing pixel acquisition rates in the fields of augmented reality, autonomous driving and robotics have increased interest in solid state beam scanning without moving parts. Modern photonic integrated laser ranging advances towards passive beam steer ...

AIP Publishing2023

Heading for the Abyss: Control Strategies for Exploiting Swinging of a Descending Tethered Aerial Robot

Frank Centamori, Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Max Mirko Polzin

The use of aerial vehicles for exploration and data collection has the potential to significantly aid environmental monitoring in environments which are dangerous and hard to navigate. However, within these environments navigation can often be restricted b ...

2023

Addressing chemical pollution in biodiversity research

Kristin Schirmer, Colette vom Berg, Ahmed Tlili

Climate change, biodiversity loss, and chemical pollution are planetary-scale emergencies requiring urgent mitigation actions. As these "triple crises" are deeply interlinked, they need to be tackled in an integrative manner. However, while climate change ...

WILEY2023

An innovative autonomous robotic system for on-site detection of heavy metal pollution plumes in surface water

Alexander Haider, Qiuyue Yang, Bhawna Nagar

Smart monitoring has been studied and developed in recent years to create faster, cheaper, and more user-friendly on-site methods. The present study describes an innovative technology for investigative monitoring of heavy metal pollution (Cu and Pb) in sur ...

SPRINGER2022

Reshaping Perception for Autonomous Driving with Semantic Keypoints

Lorenzo Bertoni

The field of artificial intelligence is set to fuel the future of mobility by driving forward the transition from advanced driver-assist systems to fully autonomous vehicles (AV). Yet the current technology, backed by cutting-edge deep learning techniques, ...

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

Pedestrian 3D Bounding Box Prediction

Alexandre Massoud Alahi, Saeed Saadatnejad, Yi Zhou Ju

Safety is still the main issue of autonomous driving, and in order to be globally deployed, they need to predict pedestrians' motions sufficiently in advance. While there is a lot of research on coarse-grained (human center prediction) and fine-grained pre ...

2022

How to Swoop and Grasp Like a Bird With a Passive Claw for a High-Speed Grasping

Matthias Müller, Dario Floreano, Enrico Ajanic, William John Stewart

There is a growing interest in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) grasping, perching, and interacting with their surroundings by means of claws, arms, hooks, and other appendages. While multirotor vehicles can slowly lower onto a target object and grasp it, w ...

2022

Safety Concerns Emerging from Robots Navigating in Crowded Pedestrian Areas

Aude Billard, Pericle Salvini, Diego Felipe Paez Granados

The slogan “robots will pervade our environment” has become a reality. Drones and ground robots are used for commercial purposes while semi-autonomous driving systems are standard accessories to traditional cars. However, while our eyes have been riveted o ...

2022

Nighttime chemistry of biomass burning emissions in urban areas: A dual mobile chamber study

Athanasios Nenes, Spyros Pandis

Residential biomass burning for heating purposes is an important source of air pollutants during winter. Here we test the hypothesis that significant secondary organic aerosol production can take place even during winter nights through oxidation of the emi ...

Copernicus GmbH2021

Detecting 32 Pedestrian Attributes for Autonomous Vehicles

Alexandre Massoud Alahi, Taylor Ferdinand Mordan

Pedestrians are arguably one of the most safety-critical road users to consider for autonomous vehicles in urban areas. In this paper, we address the problem of jointly detecting pedestrians and recognizing 32 pedestrian attributes from a single image. The ...

IEEE Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers2022

Passive Perching with Energy Storage for Winged Aerial Robots

Dario Floreano, Yegor Piskarev, William John Stewart, Luca Guarino

Perching in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offers the possibility of extending the range of aerial robots beyond the limits of their batteries. It has been a topic of intense study for multirotor UAVs. Perching in winged UAVs is harder because a kinetic e ...

2021

Arm-wrist haptic sleeve for drone teleoperation

Dario Floreano, Matteo Macchini, Vivek Ramachandran

Teleoperators rely on both visual and haptic feedback to perform drone teleoperation tasks, such as obstacle avoidance. Haptic feedback becomes essential when visual feedback is compromised, either due to visual occlusions or poor depth perception. However ...

2022

Overview: Integrative and Comprehensive Understanding on Polar Environments (iCUPE) – concept and initial results

Jenny Thomas, Julia Schmale, Jakob Boyd Pernov, Imad El Haddad

The role of polar regions is increasing in terms of megatrends such as globalization, new transport routes, demography, and the use of natural resources with consequent effects on regional and transported pollutant concentrations. We set up the ERA-PLANET ...

Copernicus Publications2020

UWB-based system for UAV Localization in GNSS-Denied Environments: Characterization and Dataset

Dario Floreano, Fabrizio Schiano

Small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have penetrated multiple domains over the past years. In GNSS-denied or indoor environments, aerial robots require a robust and stable localization system, often with external feedback, in order to fly safely. Motion ca ...

2020

Detecting 32 Pedestrian Attributes for Autonomous Vehicles

Alexandre Massoud Alahi, Taylor Ferdinand Mordan

Pedestrians are arguably one of the most safety-critical road users to consider for autonomous vehicles in urban areas. In this paper, we address the problem of jointly detecting pedestrians and recognizing 32 pedestrian attributes. These encompass visual ...

IEEE2020

STC-GAN: Spatio-Temporally Coupled Generative Adversarial Networks for Predictive Scene Parsing

Jie Luo, Yiyu Wang, Mengshi Qi

Predictive scene parsing is a task of assigning pixel-level semantic labels to a future frame of a video. It has many applications in vision-based artificial intelligent systems, e.g., autonomous driving and robot navigation. Although previous work has sho ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2020