This paper introduces a UWB-based human-following system for polar-exploration robots, integrating obstacle and crevasse avoidance functions to enhance the safety and efficiency of explorers in extreme environments. The proposed system determines the relative position of the explorer using UWB anchors and tags. It also utilizes real-time local obstacle mapping and path-planning algorithms to find safe paths that avoid collisions with obstacles. Simulation and real-world experiments confirm that the proposed system operates effectively in polar environments, reducing the operational burden on explorers and increasing mission success rates.

Tableware objects such as plates, bowls, and cups are usually textureless, uniform in color, and vary widely in shape, making it difficult to apply conventional pose estimation methods that rely on texture cues or object-specific CAD models. These limitations present a significant obstacle to robotic manipulation in restaurant environments, where reliable six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) pose estimation is essential for autonomous grasping and collection. To address this problem, we propose a model-free and texture-free 6-DoF pose estimation framework based on a transformer encoder architecture. This method uses only geometry-based features extracted from depth images, including surface vertices and rim normals, which provide strong structural priors. The pipeline begins with object detection and segmentation using a pretrained video foundation model, followed by the generation of uniformly partitioned grids from depth data. For each grid cell, centroid positions, and surface normals are computed and processed by a transformer-based model that jointly predicts object rotation and translation. Experiments with ten types of tableware demonstrate that the method achieves an average rotational error of 3.53 degrees and a translational error of 13.56 mm. Real-world deployment on a mobile robot platform with a manipulator further validated its ability to autonomously recognize and collect tableware, highlighting the practicality of the proposed geometry-driven approach for service robotics.

This paper proposes a coupled-error-based formation control algorithm for the rapid formation completion of multi-robot systems. We consider a multi-robot system with omni-directional robots with swerve-driving mechanisms and a communication system with minimized constraints. This paper introduces a coupled error that links the distance errors with the leading robot and the following robot through a coupling ratio. We propose a controller using the coupled error to achieve the control objectives of this paper. Unlike existing results that only use the information of the preceding robot, this algorithm couples the information of both the preceding robot and one’s follower. Using the proposed error-coupling-based formation control algorithm, multi-robot systems can quickly establish formations for collaboration, allowing tasks to commence swiftly and reducing deformations in formations due to speed variations. With stability analysis and simulation results for the practical application of the proposed algorithm, the approach has been verified to improve the speed of both the completion of the formation and overall system trajectory tracking, balancing trade-offs between them.