UniPilot: Enabling GPS-Denied Autonomy Across Embodiments
A unified pilot for enabling GPS-denied autonomy across different robotic embodiments. Authors: M. Kulkarni, M. Dharmadhikari, N. Khedekar, M. Nissov, M. Singh, P. Weiss and K. Alexis. Venue: IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR) 2025. This paper presents UniPilot, a compact hardware-software autonomy payload that can be integrated across diverse robot embodiments to enable autonomous operation in GPS-denied environments. The system integrates a multi-modal sensing suite including LiDAR, radar, vision, and inertial sensing for robust operation in conditions where uni-modal approaches may fail. UniPilot runs a complete autonomy software comprising multi-modal perception, exploration and inspection path planning, and learning-based navigation policies. The payload provides robust localization, mapping, planning, and safety and control capabilities in a single unit that can be deployed across a wide range of platforms. A large number of experiments are conducted across diverse environments and on a variety of robot platforms to validate the mapping, planning, and safe navigation capabilities enabled by the payload. Abstract
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