We focus on the problem of long-range dynamic replanning for off-road autonomous vehicles, where a robot plans paths through a previously unobserved environment while continuously receiving noisy local observations. An effective approach for planning under sensing uncertainty is determinization, where one converts a stochastic world into a deterministic one and plans under this simplification. This makes the planning problem tractable, but the cost of following the planned path in the real world may be different than in the determinized world. This causes collisions if the determinized world optimistically ignores obstacles, or causes unnecessarily long routes if the determinized world pessimistically imagines more obstacles. We aim to be robust to uncertainty over potential worlds while still achieving the efficiency benefits of determinization. We evaluate algorithms for dynamic replanning on a large real-world dataset of challenging long-range planning problems from the DARPA RACER program. Our method, Dynamic Replanning via Evaluating and Aggregating Multiple Samples (DREAMS), outperforms other determinization-based approaches in terms of combined traversal time and collision cost. https://sites.google.com/cs.washington.edu/dreams/

MuSHR is a low-cost, open-source robotic racecar platform for education and research, developed by the Personal Robotics Lab in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. MuSHR aspires to contribute towards democratizing the field of robotics as a low-cost platform that can be built and deployed by following detailed, open documentation and do-it-yourself tutorials. A set of demos and lab assignments developed for the Mobile Robots course at the University of Washington provide guided, hands-on experience with the platform, and milestones for further development. MuSHR is a valuable asset for academic research labs, robotics instructors, and robotics enthusiasts.

Off-road vehicles are susceptible to rollovers in terrains with large elevation features, such as steep hills, ditches, and berms. One way to protect them against rollovers is ruggedization through the use of industrial-grade parts and physical modifications. However, this solution can be prohibitively expensive for academic research labs. Our key insight is that a software-based rollover-prevention system (RPS) enables the use of commercial-off-the-shelf hardware parts that are cheaper than their industrial counterparts, thus reducing overall cost. In this paper, we present HOUND, a small-scale, inexpensive, off-road autonomy platform that can handle challenging outdoor terrains at high speeds through the integration of an RPS. HOUND is integrated with a complete stack for perception and control, geared towards aggressive offroad driving. We deploy HOUND in the real world, at high speeds, on four different terrains covering 50 km of driving and highlight its utility in preventing rollovers and traversing difficult terrain. Additionally, through integration with BeamNG, a state-of-the-art driving simulator, we demonstrate a significant reduction in rollovers without compromising turning ability across a series of simulated experiments. Supplementary material can be found on our website, where we will also release all design documents for the platform: https://sites.google.com/view/prl-hound .

We focus on the problem of rearranging a set of objects with a team of car-like robot pushers built using off-the-shelf components. Maintaining control of pushed objects while avoiding collisions in a tight space demands highly coordinated motion that is challenging to execute on constrained hardware. Centralized replanning approaches become intractable even for small-sized problems whereas decentralized approaches often get stuck in deadlocks. Our key insight is that by carefully assigning pushing tasks to robots, we could reduce the complexity of the rearrangement task, enabling robust performance via scalable decentralized control. Based on this insight, we built PuSHR, a system that optimally assigns pushing tasks and trajectories to robots offline, and performs trajectory tracking via decentralized control online. Through an ablation study in simulation, we demonstrate that PuSHR dominates baselines ranging from purely decentralized to fully decentralized in terms of success rate and time efficiency across challenging tasks with up to 4 robots. Hardware experiments demonstrate the transfer of our system to the real world and highlight its robustness to model inaccuracies. Our code can be found at https://github.com/prl-mushr/pushr, and videos from our experiments at https://youtu.be/DIWmZerF_O8.