The Autonomous Navigation and Perception Laboratory (ANPL) investigates problems related to single and multi-robot collaborative autonomous navigation and perception, with a particular focus on online, accurate and reliable operation in uncertain and unknown environments. The lab was founded by Associate Professor Vadim Indelman in 2015.
Research in the lab is highly multidisciplinary, involving topics such as sensor fusion, SLAM and navigation in GPS-deprived environments, robust perception, decision-making and belief space planning, both for single and distributed multi-robot autonomous systems. Applications span a wide range of problems in mobile aerial and ground (indoor and outdoor) robotics. ANPL’s interdisciplinary research group comprises staff and graduate and undergraduate students from different departments, including Aerospace Engineering, Computer Science and the Technion’s Autonomous System Program (TASP).
Besides office space, ANPL also includes a high ceiling testing area that is equipped with a motion-capture system. This facility allows conducting experiments with ANPL’s aerial (quadrotors) and ground robots to investigate various performance aspects of the approaches developed in the lab. The motion capture system is mainly used for providing ground truth information as inference/estimation is performed online, using onboard sensors (e.g. cameras, RGBD, laser, IMU). As such, the experiments are not limited to the testing area and can be also performed in other environments (e.g. outdoors).
