Robust Localization and Efficient Path Planning for Mobile Sensor Networks

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 전기·컴퓨터공학부, 2016. 2. 오성회.The area of wireless sensor networks has flourished over the past decade due to advances in micro-electro-mechanical sensors, low power communication and computing protocols, and embedded microprocessors. Recently, there has been a growing interest in mobile sensor networks, along with the development of robotics, and mobile sensor networks have enabled networked sensing system to solve the challenging issues of wireless sensor networks by adding mobility into many different applications of wireless sensor networks. Nonetheless, there are many challenges to be addressed in mobile sensor networks. Among these, the estimation for the exact location is perhaps the most important to obtain high fidelity of the sensory information. Moreover, planning should be required to send the mobile sensors to sensing location considering the region of interest, prior to sensor placements. These are the fundamental problems in realizing mobile sensor networks which is capable of performing monitoring mission in unstructured and dynamic environment. In this dissertation, we take an advantage of mobility which mobile sensor networks possess and develop localization and path planning algorithms suitable for mobile sensor networks. We also design coverage control strategy using resource-constrained mobile sensors by taking advantages of the proposed path planning method. The dissertation starts with the localization problem, one of the fundamental issue in mobile sensor networks. Although global positioning system (GPS) can perform relatively accurate localization, it is not feasible in many situations, especially indoor environment and costs a tremendous amount in deploying all robots equipped with GPS sensors. Thus we develop the indoor localization system suitable for mobile sensor networks using inexpensive robot platform. We focus on the technique that relies primarily on the camera sensor. Since it costs less than other sensors, all mobile robots can be easily equipped with cameras. In this dissertation, we demonstrate that the proposed method is suitable for mobile sensor networks requiring an inexpensive off-the-shelf robotic platform, by showing that it provides consistently robust location information for low-cost noisy sensors. We also focus on another fundamental issue of mobile sensor networks which is a path planning problem in order to deploy mobile sensors in specific locations. Unlike the traditional planning methods, we present an efficient cost-aware planning method suitable for mobile sensor networks by considering the given environment, where it has environmental parameters such as temperature, humidity, chemical concentration, stealthiness and elevation. A global stochastic optimization method is used to improve the efficiency of the sampling based planning algorithm. This dissertation presents the first approach of sampling based planning using global tree extension. Based on the proposed planning method, we also presents a general framework for modeling a coverage control system consisting of multiple robots with resource constraints suitable for mobile sensor networks. We describe the optimal informative planning methods which deal with maximization problem with constraints using global stochastic optimization method. In addition, we describe how to find trajectories for multiple robots efficiently to estimate the environmental field using information obtained from all robots.Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Mobile Sensor networks 1 1.1.1 Challenges 3 1.2 Overview of the Dissertation 4 Chapter 2 Background 7 2.1 Localization in MSNs 7 2.2 Path planning in MSNs 10 2.3 Informative path planning in MSNs 12 Chapter 3 Robust Indoor Localization 15 3.1 An Overview of Coordinated Multi-Robot Localization 16 3.2 Multi-Robot Localization using Multi-View Geometry 19 3.2.1 Planar Homography for Robot Localization 20 3.2.2 Image Based Robot Control 21 3.3 Multi-Robot Navigation System 25 3.3.1 Multi-Robot System 26 3.3.2 Multi-Robot Navigation 30 3.4 Experimental Results 32 3.4.1 Coordinated Multi-Robot Localization: Single-Step 32 3.4.2 Coordinated Multi-Robot Localization: Multi-Step 36 3.5 Discussions and Comparison to Leap-Frog 42 3.5.1 Discussions 42 3.5.2 Comparison to Leap-Frog 45 3.6 Summary 51 Chapter 4 Preliminaries to Cost-Aware Path Planning 53 4.1 Related works 54 4.2 Sampling based path planning 56 4.3 Cross entropy method 59 4.3.1 Cross entropy based path planning 63 Chapter 5 Fast Cost-Aware Path Planning using Stochastic Optimization 65 5.1 Problem formulation 66 5.2 Issues with sampling-based path planning for complex terrains or high dimensional spaces 68 5.3 Cost-Aware path planning (CAPP) 73 5.3.1 CE Extend 75 5.4 Analysis of CAPP 81 5.4.1 Probabilistic Completeness 81 5.4.2 Asymptotic optimality 83 5.5 Simulation and experimental results 84 5.5.1 (P1) Cost-Aware Navigation in 2D 85 5.5.2 (P2) Complex Terrain Navigation 88 5.5.3 (P3) Humanoid Motion Planning 96 5.6 Summary 103 Chapter 6 Effcient Informative Path Planning 105 6.1 Problem formulation 106 6.2 Cost-Aware informative path planning (CAIPP) 109 6.2.1 Overall procedure 110 6.2.2 Update Bound 112 6.2.3 CE Estimate 115 6.3 Analysis of CAIPP 118 6.4 Simulation and experimental results 120 6.4.1 Single robot informative path planning 120 6.4.2 Multi robot informative path planning 122 6.5 Summary 125 Chapter 7 Conclusion and Future Work 129 Appendices 131 Appendix A Proof of Theorem 1 133 Appendix B Proof of Theorem 2 135 Appendix C Proof of Theorem 3 137 Appendix D Proof of Theorem 4 139 Appendix E Dubins' curve 141 Bibliography 147 초 록 163Docto

Efficient Mission Planning for Robot Networks in Communication Constrained Environments

Many robotic systems are remotely operated nowadays that require uninterrupted connection and safe mission planning. Such systems are commonly found in military drones, search and rescue operations, mining robotics, agriculture, and environmental monitoring. Different robotic systems may employ disparate communication modalities such as radio network, visible light communication, satellite, infrared, Wi-Fi. However, in an autonomous mission where the robots are expected to be interconnected, communication constrained environment frequently arises due to the out of range problem or unavailability of the signal. Furthermore, several automated projects (building construction, assembly line) do not guarantee uninterrupted communication, and a safe project plan is required that optimizes collision risks, cost, and duration. In this thesis, we propose four pronged approaches to alleviate some of these issues: 1) Communication aware world mapping; 2) Communication preserving using the Line-of-Sight (LoS); 3) Communication aware safe planning; and 4) Multi-Objective motion planning for navigation. First, we focus on developing a communication aware world map that integrates traditional world models with the planning of multi-robot placement. Our proposed communication map selects the optimal placement of a chain of intermediate relay vehicles in order to maximize communication quality to a remote unit. We also vi propose an algorithm to build a min-Arborescence tree when there are multiple remote units to be served. Second, in communication denied environments, we use Line-of-Sight (LoS) to establish communication between mobile robots, control their movements and relay information to other autonomous units. We formulate and study the complexity of a multi-robot relay network positioning problem and propose approximation algorithms that restore visibility based connectivity through the relocation of one or more robots. Third, we develop a framework to quantify the safety score of a fully automated robotic mission where the coexistence of human and robot may pose a collision risk. A number of alternate mission plans are analyzed using motion planning algorithms to select the safest one. Finally, an efficient multi-objective optimization based path planning for the robots is developed to deal with several Pareto optimal cost attributes

Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks

In this chapter, we present a literature survey of an emerging, cutting-edge, and multi-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of Robotics and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) which we refer to as Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks (RWSN). We define a RWSN as an autonomous networked multi-robot system that aims to achieve certain sensing goals while meeting and maintaining certain communication performance requirements, through cooperative control, learning and adaptation. While both of the component areas, i.e., Robotics and WSN, are very well-known and well-explored, there exist a whole set of new opportunities and research directions at the intersection of these two fields which are relatively or even completely unexplored. One such example would be the use of a set of robotic routers to set up a temporary communication path between a sender and a receiver that uses the controlled mobility to the advantage of packet routing. We find that there exist only a limited number of articles to be directly categorized as RWSN related works whereas there exist a range of articles in the robotics and the WSN literature that are also relevant to this new field of research. To connect the dots, we first identify the core problems and research trends related to RWSN such as connectivity, localization, routing, and robust flow of information. Next, we classify the existing research on RWSN as well as the relevant state-of-the-arts from robotics and WSN community according to the problems and trends identified in the first step. Lastly, we analyze what is missing in the existing literature, and identify topics that require more research attention in the future