About the lab

Our mission is to advance state-of-the-art aerial autonomy. We are proud to be part of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
Please check our website: http://theairlab.org/

Featured research (2)

Exploration is a critical challenge in robotics, centered on understanding unknown environments. In this work, we focus on robots exploring structured indoor environments which are often predictable and composed of repeating patterns. Most existing approaches, such as conventional frontier approaches, have difficulty leveraging the predictability and explore with simple heuristics such as `closest first'. Recent works use deep learning techniques to predict unknown regions of the map, using these predictions for information gain calculation. However, these approaches are often sensitive to the predicted map quality or do not reason over sensor coverage. To overcome these issues, our key insight is to jointly reason over what the robot can observe and its uncertainty to calculate probabilistic information gain. We introduce MapEx, a new exploration framework that uses predicted maps to form probabilistic sensor model for information gain estimation. MapEx generates multiple predicted maps based on observed information, and takes into consideration both the computed variances of predicted maps and estimated visible area to estimate the information gain of a given viewpoint. Experiments on the real-world KTH dataset showed on average 12.4% improvement than representative map-prediction based exploration and 25.4% improvement than nearest frontier approach.

Lab head

Sebastian Scherer
Department
  • Robotics Institute

Members (25)

Sanjiv Singh
  • Carnegie Mellon University
Stephen Nuske
  • Carnegie Mellon University
Wenshan Wang
  • Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Junyi Geng
  • Pennsylvania State University
Azarakhsh Keipour
  • Carnegie Mellon University
Brady Moon
  • Carnegie Mellon University
Weikun Zhen
  • Carnegie Mellon University
Shibo Zhao
  • Carnegie Mellon University
Azarakhsh Keipour
Azarakhsh Keipour
  • Not confirmed yet
Simon Schopferer
Simon Schopferer
  • Not confirmed yet
Sankalp Arora
Sankalp Arora
  • Not confirmed yet
Po-Wei Chou
Po-Wei Chou
  • Not confirmed yet
zheng xu
zheng xu
  • Not confirmed yet