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SEQUENCE:1
X-APPLE-TRAVEL-ADVISORY-BEHAVIOR:AUTOMATIC
234746
20260414T152041Z
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260427T140000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:2
 0260427T150000
URL;TYPE=URI:https://www.wpi.edu/news/calendar/events/robot
 ics-engineering-masters-thesis-presentation-kashif-khurshid-noori
Robotics Engineering Master\'s Thesis Presentation: Kashif Khurshid Noori
Scout-based Route Validation and Re-Planning in Unknown Environments\n\n\n\n      \n      \n\n\n\nAbstract:
  Autonomous multi-robot missions often rely on a larger, capable worker ro
 bot to execute a task along a pre-planned route through an environment tha
 t has not yet been mapped. Sending the worker directly is risky. The route
  may be blocked, too narrow for its footprint, or otherwise infeasible, an
 d discovering this on the worker itself is expensive and sometimes unrecov
 erable. This thesis studies scout-based route validation: deploying a smal
 ler, agile scout robot to determine, ahead of time, which parts of the wor
 ker's candidate route are traversable, which require detours, and which ar
 e unreachable.The central difficulty is a fundamental information gap. The
  scout operates in unknown space, while worker feasibility can only be eva
 luated in known space. The scout has a different footprint and different c
 ollision constraints than the worker, so traversability for the scout does
  not imply traversability for the worker. The scout must therefore activel
 y plan viewpoints that observe the route well enough to reason about worke
 r feasibility, while itself navigating the unknown environment safely.We a
 ddress this with a two-phase scout exploration framework built on a graph-
 based representation of free space. The first phase biases viewpoint selec
 tion toward observing the reference route. When parts of the route turn ou
 t to be infeasible for the worker, the second phase shifts the scout's att
 ention to investigating detours through unobserved regions adjacent to the
  gaps, supporting replanning of the worker's route from observed free spac
 e. At termination, the framework reports a per-segment traversability asse
 ssment, the best replanned worker-feasible route it can construct, and an 
 explicit characterization of the remaining uncertainty grounded in how exp
 loration terminated.\nAdvisor: Professor Constantinos ChamzasCommittee: Pr
 ofessor Kevin Leahy, Professor Jing Xiao\nZoom link: https://wpi.zoom.us/j
 /99246538958\n
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