Control of off-road vehicles is challenging due to the complex dynamic interactions with the terrain. Accurate modeling of these interactions is important to optimize driving performance, but the relevant physical phenomena are too complex to model from first principles. Therefore, we present an offline meta-learning algorithm to construct a rapidly-tunable model of residual dynamics and disturbances. Our model processes terrain images into features using a visual foundation model (VFM), then maps these features and the vehicle state to an estimate of the current actuation matrix using a deep neural network (DNN). We then combine this model with composite adaptive control to modify the last layer of the DNN in real time, accounting for the remaining terrain interactions not captured during offline training. We provide mathematical guarantees of stability and robustness for our controller and demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through simulations and hardware experiments with a tracked vehicle and a car-like robot. We evaluate our method outdoors on different slopes with varying slippage and actuator degradation disturbances, and compare against an adaptive controller that does not use the VFM terrain features. We show significant improvement over the baseline in both hardware experimentation and simulation.

We present a new method to automatically generate semantic segmentation annotations for thermal imagery captured from an aerial vehicle by utilizing satellite-derived data products alongside onboard global positioning and attitude estimates. This new capability overcomes the challenge of developing thermal semantic perception algorithms for field robots due to the lack of annotated thermal field datasets and the time and costs of manual annotation, enabling precise and rapid annotation of thermal data from field collection efforts at a massively-parallelizable scale. By incorporating a thermal-conditioned refinement step with visual foundation models, our approach can produce highly-precise semantic segmentation labels using low-resolution satellite land cover data for little-to-no cost. It achieves 98.5% of the performance from using costly high-resolution options and demonstrates between 70-160% improvement over popular zero-shot semantic segmentation methods based on large vision-language models currently used for generating annotations for RGB imagery. Code will be available at: https://github.com/connorlee77/aerial-auto-segment.

We present the first publicly available RGB-thermal dataset designed for aerial robotics operating in natural environments. Our dataset captures a variety of terrains across the continental United States, including rivers, lakes, coastlines, deserts, and forests, and consists of synchronized RGB, long-wave thermal, global positioning, and inertial data. Furthermore, we provide semantic segmentation annotations for 10 classes commonly encountered in natural settings in order to facilitate the development of perception algorithms robust to adverse weather and nighttime conditions. Using this dataset, we propose new and challenging benchmarks for thermal and RGB-thermal semantic segmentation, RGB-to-thermal image translation, and visual-inertial odometry. We present extensive results using state-of-the-art methods and highlight the challenges posed by temporal and geographical domain shifts in our data.

We present a new method to adapt an RGB-trained water segmentation network to target-domain aerial thermal imagery using online self-supervision by leveraging texture and motion cues as supervisory signals. This new thermal capability enables current autonomous aerial robots operating in near-shore environments to perform tasks such as visual navigation, bathymetry, and flow tracking at night. Our method overcomes the problem of scarce and difficult-to-obtain near-shore thermal data that prevents the application of conventional supervised and unsupervised methods. In this work, we curate the first aerial thermal near-shore dataset, show that our approach outperforms fully-supervised segmentation models trained on limited target-domain thermal data, and demonstrate real-time capabilities onboard an Nvidia Jetson embedded computing platform. Code and datasets used in this work will be available at: https://github.com/connorlee77/uav-thermal-water-segmentation.

We advance the Cohn-Umans framework for developing fast matrix multiplication algorithms. We introduce, analyze, and search for a new subclass of strong uniquely solvable puzzles (SUSP), which we call simplifiable SUSPs. We show that these puzzles are efficiently verifiable, which remains an open question for general SUSPs. We also show that individual simplifiable SUSPs can achieve the same strength of bounds on the matrix multiplication exponent $\omega$ that infinite families of SUSPs can. We report on the construction, by computer search, of larger SUSPs than previously known for small width. This, combined with our tighter analysis, strengthens the upper bound on the matrix multiplication exponent from $2.66$ to $2.505$ obtainable via this computational approach, and nears the results of the handcrafted constructions of Cohn et al.

This paper presents and discusses algorithms, hardware, and software architecture developed by the TEAM CoSTAR (Collaborative SubTerranean Autonomous Robots), competing in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge. Specifically, it presents the techniques utilized within the Tunnel (2019) and Urban (2020) competitions, where CoSTAR achieved 2nd and 1st place, respectively. We also discuss CoSTAR's demonstrations in Martian-analog surface and subsurface (lava tubes) exploration. The paper introduces our autonomy solution, referred to as NeBula (Networked Belief-aware Perceptual Autonomy). NeBula is an uncertainty-aware framework that aims at enabling resilient and modular autonomy solutions by performing reasoning and decision making in the belief space (space of probability distributions over the robot and world states). We discuss various components of the NeBula framework, including: (i) geometric and semantic environment mapping; (ii) a multi-modal positioning system; (iii) traversability analysis and local planning; (iv) global motion planning and exploration behavior; (i) risk-aware mission planning; (vi) networking and decentralized reasoning; and (vii) learning-enabled adaptation. We discuss the performance of NeBula on several robot types (e.g. wheeled, legged, flying), in various environments. We discuss the specific results and lessons learned from fielding this solution in the challenging courses of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge competition.

Recently, an extension of independent component analysis (ICA) from one to multiple datasets, termed independent vector analysis (IVA), has been the subject of significant research interest. IVA has also been shown to be a generalization of Hotelling's canonical correlation analysis. In this paper, we provide the identification conditions for a general IVA formulation, which accounts for linear, nonlinear, and sample-to-sample dependencies. The identification conditions are a generalization of previous results for ICA and for IVA when samples are independently and identically distributed. Furthermore, a principal aim of IVA is the identification of dependent sources between datasets. Thus, we provide the additional conditions for when the arbitrary ordering of the sources within each dataset is common. Performance bounds in terms of the Cramer-Rao lower bound are also provided for the demixing matrices and interference to source ratio. The performance of two IVA algorithms are compared to the theoretical bounds.