Dear roboticists,

the Verti-Wheelers project developed at the RobotiXX lab at George Mason University is officially open-sourced and public to the whole robotics community! In this project, we developed platforms, datasets, and algorithms to empower conventional wheeled robot platforms to move through off-road terrain with vertical protrusions from the ground, such as steep slopes, rocky outcroppings, and uneven surfaces. Without specialized hardware, the Verti-Wheelers project encourages the community to develop enhanced wheeled mobility on such vertically challenging terrain together.

The build of our Verti-Wheelers (both hardware and software), hours of demonstrated crawling datasets, and three baseline algorithms are all open-sourced for the community’s use. With the Verti-Wheelers, we look forward to superior robot mobility that allows mobile robots to venture to many difficult spaces which are previously inaccessible to wheeled robots. Please feel free to use the Verti-Wheelers resources for your next research project and your education effort!

Verti-Wheelers Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gffm4WHdNyg&t=1s Verti-Wheelers Website: https://cs.gmu.edu/~xiao/Research/Verti-Wheelers/ Verti-Wheelers Preprint: https://cs.gmu.edu/~xiao/papers/vw.pdf Verti-Wheelers Datasets: https://dataverse.orc.gmu.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.13021/orc202... Verti-Wheelers Resources: https://github.com/RobotiXX/Verti-Wheelers

Thanks Xuesu

----------------------- Xuesu Xiao, Ph.D. -- Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science George Mason University x**o@gmu.edu https://cs.gmu.edu/~xiao/