About Workshop

Humans are all connected worldwide – We share air, water, and food from our planet. We have responsibilities to monitor and manage our valuable assets; forests, mountains, and crops therein for our future generations. However, current efforts require intensive human labor; and heavy machines come with a dramatic environmental impact, not only regarding carbon footprints, but also soil compaction and noise disturbing ecosystems. Small robots with some degree of autonomy therefore hold enormous promise. However, much of current autonomous robot research and development focuses on their use inside more structured and controlled built environments. The objective of this workshop is to share visions and recent research progress on enabling robot navigation, as well as physical interaction through manipulation in natural outdoors environments, addressing the vast challenges in perception of completely open-ended, sometimes dynamic, and ever-changing surroundings, as well as navigation and interaction therein.

Topics of Interest

• Navigation of aerial and ground robots in outdoor environments
• Large-scale and long-term robot state estimation and navigation
• Perception systems in complex and dynamic environments
• (Dense) mapping in cluttered environments
• Integrated planning and learning for outdoor robots
• Mobile manipulation for harvesting
• Applications to environmental monitoring, forestry, precision agriculture

Program

13:30 ~ 13:40	Introduction
13:40 ~ 14:00	Prof. Fei Gao & Tianyue Wu
	Swarm of Micro Robots Flying Out of Laboratory
14:00 ~ 14:20	Dr. Peyman Moghadam
	Long-Term Robot Learning in Natural Environments:
	Challenges and Opportunities (remote)
14:20 ~ 14:40	Prof. Fu Zhang
	UAV navigation and mapping using LiDAR sensors (remote)
14:40 ~ 15:00	Prof. Hyun Myung
	Autonomous robot navigation in rough terrains using spatial AI
	(remote)
15:00 ~ 15:30	Lightning Talks
	Mason B. Peterson Outdoor global localization
	Samhita Marri PlantTrack
	Minghuan Liu Visual whole-body control for legged loco-manipulation
15:30 ~ 16:00	Poster session & Coffee break
16:00 ~ 16:20	Prof. Marija Popovic
	Adaptive environmental monitoring using UAVs
16:20 ~ 16:40	Prof. Timothy Barfoot
	Taking a Hard Line: Robot Navigation
	When Lighting, Weather, and Geometry Won’t Cooperate
16:40 ~ 17:00	Prof. Marco Hutter & Jonas Frey
	Learning Perception and Navigation:
	Towards autonomous robots in the wild
17:00 ~ 17:20	Prof. Vijay Kumar
	Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles for Precision Agriculture and
	Forestry (remote)
17:20 ~ 17:50	Pannel discussion
17:50 ~ 18:00	Paper award & Closing

Accepted papers

• APF-based Real-Time Cooperative Collision Avoidance for n-DOF Manipulators
  Erick J. Rodrıguez-Seda, Michael M. D. Kutzer.
• Autonomous Gas Distribution Mapping using Multi-Informed Tree Planning
  Mal Fazliu, Matthew Coombes, Cunjia Liu.
• CropFollowRL: Learning Under-Canopy Navigation Policy with Keypoints Abstraction
  Arun Narenthiran Sivakumar, Ning Wang, Felipe Andrade G. Tommaselli, Mateus Valverde Gasparino, Marcelo Becker, Girish Chowdhary.
• DynORecon: Dynamic Object Reconstruction Based on Dynamic SLAM
  Yiduo Wang, Jesse Morris, Viorela Ila.
• Learning Dynamics for Agile Quadrotor State Estimation
  Giovanni Cioffi, Davide Scaramuzza.
• Outdoor Global Localization via Robust Registration of 3D Open-Set Segments
  Mason B. Peterson, Yi Xuan Jia, Yulun Tian, Jonathan P. How.
• PlantTrack: Task-Driven Plant Keypoint Tracking with Zero-Shot Sim2Real Transfer
  Samhita Marri, Arun N. Sivakumar, Naveen K. Uppalapati, Girish Chowdhary.
• Visual Whole-Body Control for Legged Loco-Manipulation
  Minghuan Liu, Zixuan Chen, Xuxin Cheng, Yandong Ji, Rizhao Qiu, Ruihan Yang, Xiaolong Wang.

Organizers

Dr. Jaehyung Jung, TUM		Prof. Konstantinos Alexis, NTNU

Prof. Maurice Fallon, Univ. of Oxford

Prof. Stefan Leutenegger, TUM