HERON: Autonomous Road Maintenance
Final pilot for the EU project HERON: a robot that autonomously surveys road damage, plans repairs, and executes them without human intervention.
Projects & Demos
Words are cheap. Here are some robots actually doing things.
nvblox: Online 3D Mapping for Navigation
nvblox running on a warehouse robot, building a 3D map and dodging obstacles in real time on a cheap embedded GPU. This is how you get a robot to navigate safely in a space it's never seen before.
CUROBO: GPU-Accelerated Manipulation
CUROBO plans collision-free arm motions in milliseconds by running thousands of trajectories in parallel on a GPU. Combined with nvblox for live 3D scene understanding, the robot can pick and place in cluttered, changing environments without stopping to think.
Mixed Reality Robotics: Bring me a Beer
Work from the Microsoft Mixed Reality & AI Lab. You put on a HoloLens, tap where you want the robot to go, and it goes there in the real world. In this demo, the robot brings you a beer. Priorities.
COIN-LIO: Robust LiDAR-Inertial Odometry in Degenerate Environments
Robots that navigate by LiDAR break down in tunnels, corridors, and open fields where everything looks the same. COIN-LIO fixes this by also using the intensity of the laser returns, so the robot can tell surfaces apart even when the geometry is featureless.
Voxgraph: Globally-Consistent Volumetric Mapping
Voxgraph lets a robot build a large, accurate 3D map of its environment in real time on a regular CPU. As the robot revisits areas, the map self-corrects so the whole thing stays consistent, not just the local patch.
(PhD Thesis) Full Open-Source, On-Board System for Drone Mapping and Planning
Summary of my PhD work: a complete open-source system that lets a drone fly autonomously through cluttered, GPS-denied environments. The drone builds a 3D map on the fly and plans safe paths through it, all running on-board.
Visual–Inertial Navigation & Thermal Submapping for Search-and-Rescue
A drone that autonomously explores a collapsed or cluttered space, builds a 3D map, and highlights heat signatures of people using a thermal camera. The idea: send a robot in first so rescuers know where to go before they risk their lives.