Adarsh Patnaik

Rohan Thakker, Adarsh Patnaik, Vince Kurtz et al.

Safe, reliable navigation in extreme, unfamiliar terrain is required for future robotic space exploration missions. Recent generative-AI methods learn semantically aware navigation policies from large, cross-embodiment datasets, but offer limited safety guarantees. Inspired by human cognitive science, we propose a risk-guided diffusion framework that fuses a fast, learned "System-1" with a slow, physics-based "System-2", sharing computation at both training and inference to couple adaptability with formal safety. Hardware experiments conducted at the NASA JPL's Mars-analog facility, Mars Yard, show that our approach reduces failure rates by up to $4\times$ while matching the goal-reaching performance of learning-based robotic models by leveraging inference-time compute without any additional training.

Adarsh Patnaik, Ashish Ranjan Hota

This work presents a distributed MPC-based approach to solving the problem of multi-agent point-to-point transition with optimization-based collision avoidance. The problem is formulated, motivated by the work on collision avoidance for multi-agent systems and dynamic obstacles. With modifications to the formulation, the problem is converted into a distributed problem with a separable objective and coupled constraints. The problem is divided into local sub-problems and solved using Alternating Directions Method of Multipliers(ADMM) applied on an augmented local lagrangian objective.This work aims to understand the multi-agent point-to-point transition problem as an extension of optimization-based collision avoidance and analyze the aspects of computational times, reliability, and optimality of the solution obtained.

Adarsh Patnaik, Manthan Patel, Vibhakar Mohta et al.

This article is an overview of the various literature on path tracking methods and their implementation in simulation and realistic operating environments.The scope of this study includes analysis, implementation,tuning, and comparison of some selected path tracking methods commonly used in practice for trajectory tracking in autonomous vehicles. Many of these methods are applicable at low speed due to the linear assumption for the system model, and hence, some methods are also included that consider nonlinearities present in lateral vehicle dynamics during high-speed navigation. The performance evaluation and comparison of tracking methods are carried out on realistic simulations and a dedicated instrumented passenger car, Mahindra e2o, to get a performance idea of all the methods in realistic operating conditions and develop tuning methodologies for each of the methods. It has been observed that our model predictive control-based approach is able to perform better compared to the others in medium velocity ranges.