This article presents the core technologies and deployment strategies of Team CERBERUS
that enabled our winning run in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge finals. CERBERUS is a …

Legged robots that can operate autonomously in remote and hazardous environments will
greatly increase opportunities for exploration into underexplored areas. Exteroceptive …

Dynamic locomotion in rough terrain requires accurate foot placement, collision avoidance,
and planning of the underactuated dynamics of the system. Reliably optimizing for such …

We present visual inertial lidar legged navigation system (VILENS), an odometry system for
legged robots based on factor graphs. The key novelty is the tight fusion of four different …

The incessant progress of robotic technology and rationalization of human manpower
induces high expectations in society, but also resentment and even fear. In this paper, we …

This paper presents a novel strategy for autonomous teamed exploration of subterranean
environments using legged and aerial robots. Tailored to the fact that subterranean settings …

Perceiving the surrounding environment is crucial for autonomous mobile robots. An
elevation map provides a memory-efficient and simple yet powerful geometric represen …

Terrain geometry is, in general, nonsmooth, nonlinear, nonconvex, and, if perceived through
a robot-centric visual unit, appears partially occluded and noisy. This article presents the …

Despite the progress in legged robotic locomotion, autonomous navigation in unknown
environments remains an open problem. Ideally, the navigation system utilizes the full …

Confined and subterranean areas are common in many civilian and industrial sites,
although they are hazardous for humans given the presence of noxious gases, extreme …