25 research outputs found
Technical Report: A Receding Horizon Algorithm for Informative Path Planning with Temporal Logic Constraints
This technical report is an extended version of the paper 'A Receding Horizon
Algorithm for Informative Path Planning with Temporal Logic Constraints'
accepted to the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
(ICRA). This paper considers the problem of finding the most informative path
for a sensing robot under temporal logic constraints, a richer set of
constraints than have previously been considered in information gathering. An
algorithm for informative path planning is presented that leverages tools from
information theory and formal control synthesis, and is proven to give a path
that satisfies the given temporal logic constraints. The algorithm uses a
receding horizon approach in order to provide a reactive, on-line solution
while mitigating computational complexity. Statistics compiled from multiple
simulation studies indicate that this algorithm performs better than a baseline
exhaustive search approach.Comment: Extended version of paper accepted to 2013 IEEE International
Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA
Robust Environmental Mapping by Mobile Sensor Networks
Constructing a spatial map of environmental parameters is a crucial step to
preventing hazardous chemical leakages, forest fires, or while estimating a
spatially distributed physical quantities such as terrain elevation. Although
prior methods can do such mapping tasks efficiently via dispatching a group of
autonomous agents, they are unable to ensure satisfactory convergence to the
underlying ground truth distribution in a decentralized manner when any of the
agents fail. Since the types of agents utilized to perform such mapping are
typically inexpensive and prone to failure, this results in poor overall
mapping performance in real-world applications, which can in certain cases
endanger human safety. This paper presents a Bayesian approach for robust
spatial mapping of environmental parameters by deploying a group of mobile
robots capable of ad-hoc communication equipped with short-range sensors in the
presence of hardware failures. Our approach first utilizes a variant of the
Voronoi diagram to partition the region to be mapped into disjoint regions that
are each associated with at least one robot. These robots are then deployed in
a decentralized manner to maximize the likelihood that at least one robot
detects every target in their associated region despite a non-zero probability
of failure. A suite of simulation results is presented to demonstrate the
effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method when compared to existing
techniques.Comment: accepted to icra 201
Technical Report: Cooperative Multi-Target Localization With Noisy Sensors
This technical report is an extended version of the paper 'Cooperative
Multi-Target Localization With Noisy Sensors' accepted to the 2013 IEEE
International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
This paper addresses the task of searching for an unknown number of static
targets within a known obstacle map using a team of mobile robots equipped with
noisy, limited field-of-view sensors. Such sensors may fail to detect a subset
of the visible targets or return false positive detections. These measurement
sets are used to localize the targets using the Probability Hypothesis Density,
or PHD, filter. Robots communicate with each other on a local peer-to-peer
basis and with a server or the cloud via access points, exchanging measurements
and poses to update their belief about the targets and plan future actions. The
server provides a mechanism to collect and synthesize information from all
robots and to share the global, albeit time-delayed, belief state to robots
near access points. We design a decentralized control scheme that exploits this
communication architecture and the PHD representation of the belief state.
Specifically, robots move to maximize mutual information between the target set
and measurements, both self-collected and those available by accessing the
server, balancing local exploration with sharing knowledge across the team.
Furthermore, robots coordinate their actions with other robots exploring the
same local region of the environment.Comment: Extended version of paper accepted to 2013 IEEE International
Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA
Utilising Assured Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning within safety-critical scenarios
Multi-agent reinforcement learning allows a team of agents to learn how to work together to solve complex decision-making problems in a shared environment. However, this learning process utilises stochastic mechanisms, meaning that its use in safety-critical domains can be problematic. To overcome this issue, we propose an Assured Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (AMARL) approach that uses a model checking technique called quantitative verification to provide formal guarantees of agent compliance with safety, performance, and other non-functional requirements during and after the reinforcement learning process. We demonstrate the applicability of our AMARL approach in three different patrolling navigation domains in which multi-agent systems must learn to visit key areas by using different types of reinforcement learning algorithms (temporal difference learning, game theory, and direct policy search). Furthermore, we compare the effectiveness of these algorithms when used in combination with and without our approach. Our extensive experiments with both homogeneous and heterogeneous multi-agent systems of different sizes show that the use of AMARL leads to safety requirements being consistently satisfied and to better overall results than standard reinforcement learning
A Scalable Information Theoretic Approach to Distributed Robot Coordination
This paper presents a scalable information theoretic approach to infer the state of an environment by distributively controlling robots equipped with sensors. The robots iteratively estimate the environment state using a recursive Bayesian filter, while continuously moving to improve the quality of the estimate by following the gradient of mutual information. Both the filter and the controller use a novel algorithm for approximating the robots' joint measurement probabilities, which combines consensus (for decentralization) and sampling (for scalability). The approximations are shown to approach the true joint measurement probabilities as the size of the consensus rounds grows or as the network becomes complete. The resulting gradient controller runs in constant time with respect to the number of robots, and linear time with respect to the number of sensor measurements and environment discretization cells, while traditional mutual information methods are exponential in all of these quantities. Furthermore, the controller is proven to be convergent between consensus rounds and, under certain conditions, is locally optimal. The complete distributed inference and coordination algorithm is demonstrated in experiments with five quad-rotor flying robots and simulations with 100 robots.This work is sponsored by the Department of the Air Force under Air Force contract number FA8721-05-C-0002. The opinions, interpretations, recommendations, and conclusions are those of the authors and are not necessarily endorsed by the United States Government. This work is also supported in part by ARO grant number W911NF-05-1-0219, ONR grant number N00014-09-1-1051, NSF grant number EFRI-0735953, ARL grant number W911NF-08-2-0004, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the European Commission, and the Boeing Company
Distributed Estimation with Information-Seeking Control in Agent Network
We introduce a distributed, cooperative framework and method for Bayesian
estimation and control in decentralized agent networks. Our framework combines
joint estimation of time-varying global and local states with
information-seeking control optimizing the behavior of the agents. It is suited
to nonlinear and non-Gaussian problems and, in particular, to location-aware
networks. For cooperative estimation, a combination of belief propagation
message passing and consensus is used. For cooperative control, the negative
posterior joint entropy of all states is maximized via a gradient ascent. The
estimation layer provides the control layer with probabilistic information in
the form of sample representations of probability distributions. Simulation
results demonstrate intelligent behavior of the agents and excellent estimation
performance for a simultaneous self-localization and target tracking problem.
In a cooperative localization scenario with only one anchor, mobile agents can
localize themselves after a short time with an accuracy that is higher than the
accuracy of the performed distance measurements.Comment: 17 pages, 10 figure