Lander.AI: Adaptive Landing Behavior Agent for Expertise in 3D Dynamic Platform Landings

Mastering autonomous drone landing on dynamic platforms presents formidable challenges due to unpredictable velocities and external disturbances caused by the wind, ground effect, turbines or propellers of the docking platform. This study introduces an advanced Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agent, Lander:AI, designed to navigate and land on platforms in the presence of windy conditions, thereby enhancing drone autonomy and safety. Lander:AI is rigorously trained within the gym-pybullet-drone simulation, an environment that mirrors real-world complexities, including wind turbulence, to ensure the agent's robustness and adaptability. The agent's capabilities were empirically validated with Crazyflie 2.1 drones across various test scenarios, encompassing both simulated environments and real-world conditions. The experimental results showcased Lander:AI's high-precision landing and its ability to adapt to moving platforms, even under wind-induced disturbances. Furthermore, the system performance was benchmarked against a baseline PID controller augmented with an Extended Kalman Filter, illustrating significant improvements in landing precision and error recovery. Lander:AI leverages bio-inspired learning to adapt to external forces like birds, enhancing drone adaptability without knowing force magnitudes.This research not only advances drone landing technologies, essential for inspection and emergency applications, but also highlights the potential of DRL in addressing intricate aerodynamic challenges.

CognitiveOS: Large Multimodal Model based System to Endow Any Type of Robot with Generative AI

This paper introduces CognitiveOS, a disruptive system based on multiple transformer-based models, endowing robots of various types with cognitive abilities not only for communication with humans but also for task resolution through physical interaction with the environment. The system operates smoothly on different robotic platforms without extra tuning. It autonomously makes decisions for task execution by analyzing the environment and using information from its long-term memory. The system underwent testing on various platforms, including quadruped robots and manipulator robots, showcasing its capability to formulate behavioral plans even for robots whose behavioral examples were absent in the training dataset. Experimental results revealed the system's high performance in advanced task comprehension and adaptability, emphasizing its potential for real-world applications. The chapters of this paper describe the key components of the system and the dataset structure. The dataset for fine-tuning step generation model is provided at the following link: link coming soon

Evolutionary Swarm Robotics: Dynamic Subgoal-Based Path Formation and Task Allocation for Exploration and Navigation in Unknown Environments

This research paper addresses the challenges of exploration and navigation in unknown environments from an evolutionary swarm robotics perspective. Path formation plays a crucial role in enabling cooperative swarm robots to accomplish these tasks. The paper presents a method called the sub-goal-based path formation, which establishes a path between two different locations by exploiting visually connected sub-goals. Simulation experiments conducted in the Argos simulator demonstrate the successful formation of paths in the majority of trials. Furthermore, the paper tackles the problem of inter-collision (traffic) among a large number of robots engaged in path formation, which negatively impacts the performance of the sub-goal-based method. To mitigate this issue, a task allocation strategy is proposed, leveraging local communication protocols and light signal-based communication. The strategy evaluates the distance between points and determines the required number of robots for the path formation task, reducing unwanted exploration and traffic congestion. The performance of the sub-goal-based path formation and task allocation strategy is evaluated by comparing path length, time, and resource reduction against the A* algorithm. The simulation experiments demonstrate promising results, showcasing the scalability, robustness, and fault tolerance characteristics of the proposed approach.

NeuroSwarm: Multi-Agent Neural 3D Scene Reconstruction and Segmentation with UAV for Optimal Navigation of Quadruped Robot

Quadruped robots have the distinct ability to adapt their body and step height to navigate through cluttered environments. Nonetheless, for these robots to utilize their full potential in real-world scenarios, they require awareness of their environment and obstacle geometry. We propose a novel multi-agent robotic system that incorporates cutting-edge technologies. The proposed solution features a 3D neural reconstruction algorithm that enables navigation of a quadruped robot in both static and semi-static environments. The prior areas of the environment are also segmented according to the quadruped robots' abilities to pass them. Moreover, we have developed an adaptive neural field optimal motion planner (ANFOMP) that considers both collision probability and obstacle height in 2D space.Our new navigation and mapping approach enables quadruped robots to adjust their height and behavior to navigate under arches and push through obstacles with smaller dimensions. The multi-agent mapping operation has proven to be highly accurate, with an obstacle reconstruction precision of 82%. Moreover, the quadruped robot can navigate with 3D obstacle information and the ANFOMP system, resulting in a 33.3% reduction in path length and a 70% reduction in navigation time.