The SLAM community has fallen into a "Confidence Trap" by prioritizing benchmark scores over principled uncertainty estimation. This yields systems that are geometrically accurate but probabilitistically inconsistent and brittle. We advocate for a paradigm shift where the consistent, real-time computation of uncertainty becomes a primary metric of success.
This document serves as supplementary material for two International Society for Terrain-Vehicle Systems conference publications regarding in situ soil property estimation by Wagner et al. in 2023 and 2025. It covers the derivation of the fundamental equation of earthmoving for a flat blade moving through sloped soil and provides some information regarding the advanced configuration of Vortex Studio's soil-tool interaction simulation.
Sixten Dahlbom, Stina Andersson, Eric De Carvalho
et al.
In recent years, fire accidents on Ro-Ro ships have led to numerous fatalities and significant economic losses. The response of the crew and the ship's protection systems are crucial in managing these incidents and mitigating their consequences. To assess fire safety improvements, this study has focused on developing and quantifying a risk model that captures the dynamics of a fire starting in a Ro-Ro space. Various risk modelling techniques were reviewed to construct the model, which was then quantified using historical data, simulations, and expert judgments. A Delphi-based, fully digital approach to expert elicitation was introduced, utilizing Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Excel-based questionnaires. This method ensured full anonymity for the experts, reducing the risk of group bias and eliminating the need for travel. To enhance understanding and verify the results, uncertainty and sensitivity analyses were performed. They revealed that the potential loss of life deviated, with 90% confidence, from the calculated mean value by less than 26%. Overall, the questionnaire-based method proved effective for expert elicitation and for quantifying nodes in the risk model, demonstrating its utility in the risk assessment process.
Sustainability is no longer a matter of choice but is invariably linked to the survival of the entire ecosystem of our planet Earth. As robotics technology is growing at an exponential rate, it is crucial to examine its implications for sustainability. Our focus is on social sustainability, specifically analyzing the role of robotics technology in this domain by identifying six distinct ways robots influence social sustainability.
Alessia Ferraro, Vito Antonio Nardi, Valerio Scordamaglia
In this paper, an uncertain norm-bounded mathematical model for a remotely controlled skid-slip tracked mobile robot. The linear state space description aims to describe the nonlinear error dynamics of the robot during the trajectory tracking maneuver in the presence of a delay in the control channel, taking into account unknown but bounded slip coefficients.
Cristina Gena, Claudio Mattutino, Andrea Maieli
et al.
This position paper introduces the results of an initial card sorting experiment based on the reactions and questions of a group of children with autism working with a humanoid robot in a therapeutic laboratory on autonomy.
Landing is a challenging part of autonomous drone flight and a great research opportunity. This PhD proposes to improve on fiducial autonomous landing algorithms by making them more flexible. Further, it leverages its location, Iceland, to develop a method for landing on lava flows in cooperation with analog Mars exploration missions taking place in Iceland now - and potentially for future Mars landings.
Ryuichiro Higashinaka, Takashi Minato, Hiromitsu Nishizaki
et al.
The proceedings contain papers on the dialogue systems developed by the twelve teams participating in DRC2022, as well as an overview paper summarizing the competition.
Edges are the fundamental visual element for discovering tiny obstacles using a monocular camera. Nevertheless, tiny obstacles often have weak and inconsistent edge cues due to various properties such as small size and similar appearance to the free space, making it hard to capture them. ...
In this paper, we study the complexity of the selection of a graph discretization order with a stepwise linear cost function. Finding such vertex ordering has been proved to be an essential step to solve discretizable distance geometry problems (DDGPs). DDGPs constitute a class of graph realization problems where the vertices can be ordered in such a way that the search space of possible positions becomes discrete, usually represented by a binary tree. In particular, it is useful to find discretization orders that minimize an indicator of the size of the search tree. Our stepwise linear cost function generalizes this situation and allows to discriminate the vertices into three categories depending on the number of adjacent predecessors of each vertex in the order and on two parameters K and U. We provide a complete study of NP-completeness for fixed values of K and U. Our main result is that the problem is NP-complete in general for all values of K and U such that U ≥ K + 1 and U ≥ 2. A consequence of this result is that the minimization of vertices with exactly K adjacent predecessors in a discretization order is also NP-complete.
Aleksandar Stanoev, Adnan Aijaz, Anthony Portelli
et al.
Achieving closed-loop control over wireless is crucial in realizing the vision of Industry 4.0 and beyond. This demonstration shows the viability of closed-loop control over wireless through a high-performance wireless solution. The closed-loop control problem involves remote balancing of a two-wheeled robot that represents an inverted pendulum on wheels.
This paper describes a novel SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) scheme based on scan matching in an environment including various physical properties.
The paper offers general technical facts on the kinematics of a moving continuum involved in research on robotic following of flexible extended objects.
The majority of everyday tasks involve interacting with unstructured environments. This implies that, in order for robots to be truly useful they must be able to handle contacts. This paper explores how a particle filter can be used to localize a contact point and estimate the external force. We demonstrate the capability of the particle filter on a simulated 4DoF planar robotic arm, and compare it to a well-established analytical approach.
Human-robot collaboration including close physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) is a current trend in industry and also science. The safety guidelines prescribe two modes of safety: (i) power and force limitation and (ii) speed and separation monitoring. We examine the potential of robots equipped with artificial sensitive skin and a protective safety zone around it (peripersonal space) to safe pHRI.
In this note we recall (see also [8]) the structure of all recurrent sequences which satisfy a fixed recurrence relation, with entries in a perfect field. As a consequence of these considerations we give a reasonable proof for the known result that the Hadamard product of two recurrent sequences is also a recurrent sequence.
Sagır and Gungor defined the superposition operator P_g where g:N^2 × R → R by P_g ((x_{ks})) = g (k, s, x_{ks}) for all real double sequences (x_{ks}). Chew &Lee and Petranuarat & Kemprasit characterized P_g : c_0 → l_1 and _Pg : c_0 → l_q
where 1 ≤ q < ∞, respectively. Sagır and Gungor gave the necessary and sufficient conditions for the continuity of the superposition operator P_g acting from the double
sequences space C_{r0} into L_p where 1 ≤ p < ∞. In this study, we have generalized P_g acting from the double sequences space of Maddox C_{r0} (p) into L(q) where p = (p_{ks}) and
q = (q_{ks}) are bounded double sequences of positive numbers. The main aim of this study is to give the necessary and sufficient conditions for the continuity of P_g : C_{r0} (p) → L(q).