Summary: The IU Racing Team is a diverse group of passionate students from Indiana University, spanning PhD, Master’s, and undergraduate programs. Led by Prof. Lantao Liu, head of the VAIL Lab, the team specializes in various facets of the autonomy stack; ranging from perception to planning to control. This diverse expertise is crucial in developing and implementing cutting-edge technology for the fastest fully autonomous racing car.

Summary: This video showcases the presentation of our article titled "Autonomous Navigation, mapping, and Exploration using Gaussian Processes" at the RSS23.

In this study, we propose a new framework that can simultaneously accomplish multiple objectives that are essential to robot autonomy including identifying free space for navigation, building a metric-topological representation for mapping, and ensuring good spatial coverage for unknown space exploration. Different from existing work that models these critical objectives separately, we show that navigation, mapping, and exploration can be derived with the same foundation modeled with a sparse variant of a Gaussian process. 

Summary: This video showcases the presentation of our article titled "GP-guided MPPI for Efficient Navigation in Complex Unknown Cluttered Environments" at the IROS 2023. 

In this study, we introduced an online learning-based control strategy (named GP-MPPI) that integrates the MPPI algorithm with a local perception model based on Sparse Gaussian Process (SGP). introduces an online learning-based control strategy (named GP-MPPI) that integrates the MPPI algorithm with a local perception model based on Sparse Gaussian Process (SGP). 

Workshop with Code19 to prepare for the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) and Abu-Dhabi Autonomous Racing League (A2RL32). Code19 introduced to us the Autonoma racing simulator and the basic system architecture for autonomous racing.

 Participated in the Project Based Learning Workshop at Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology (E-JUST), Alexandria, Egypt. During the four-day workshop, we gained hands-on experience in designing and implementing a line-following robot using only the C language to navigate through a small maze.

"Made In Egypt" or MIE is a University-Industry linkage program founded and organized by the IEEE Egypt GOLD affinity group, that aims at bridging the gap between the academic community - including both research and educational sectors - and the industrial community. MIE includes a training workshop and a competition, the training aims to cover the missed points about human skills & market research.

The theme of the competition is 'The Caregiver'. The contest's objective is to build robots taking care of elder people by maximally filling the correct pills into corresponding pillboxes within the time limit. Each team will have to design and construct 2 robots to complete the task. The robots can be remotely controlled, fully autonomous, or semi-autonomous.

The theme of the competition is 'The Great Harvest'. The main objective is to collect as much fruit as possible from the trees and sort them into appropriate containers. Each has to design 3 robots: i) Harvesting robot: This robot harvests fruits from the field and puts them into buckets.  ii) Sorting robot: This robot performs the task of placing fruits brought to the sorting area into appropriate containers. iii) Bridge robot: This robot will act as a bridge connecting the harvesting area and the sorting area.

The theme of the competition is 'A greeting to parenthood'. Each team makes two robots, one automatic and one manual robot, and they will work together to perform 4 activities (seesaw, pole walk, swing and jungle gym) in the playground. The match is contested by two teams in red and blue. The team that carried out three activities and the 'Shabaash' raises the flag after reaching the top of the jungle gym first wins the game.

Roborace, organized by Mansoura University, is a national competition where each participating team is tasked with designing and constructing a remotely controlled robot capable of operating in challenging environments. The set of tasks includes navigating through sand, tackling slopes, and rainy conditions. The primary objective for the robots is to collect small blocks and use them to construct a bridge, ultimately reaching the designated goal point.