6,811 research outputs found
End-to-End Design for Self-Reconfigurable Heterogeneous Robotic Swarms
More widespread adoption requires swarms of robots to be more flexible for
real-world applications. Multiple challenges remain in complex scenarios where
a large amount of data needs to be processed in real-time and high degrees of
situational awareness are required. The options in this direction are limited
in existing robotic swarms, mostly homogeneous robots with limited operational
and reconfiguration flexibility. We address this by bringing elastic computing
techniques and dynamic resource management from the edge-cloud computing domain
to the swarm robotics domain. This enables the dynamic provisioning of
collective capabilities in the swarm for different applications. Therefore, we
transform a swarm into a distributed sensing and computing platform capable of
complex data processing tasks, which can then be offered as a service. In
particular, we discuss how this can be applied to adaptive resource management
in a heterogeneous swarm of drones, and how we are implementing the dynamic
deployment of distributed data processing algorithms. With an elastic drone
swarm built on reconfigurable hardware and containerized services, it will be
possible to raise the self-awareness, degree of intelligence, and level of
autonomy of heterogeneous swarms of robots. We describe novel directions for
collaborative perception, and new ways of interacting with a robotic swarm
Efficient Dispersion of Mobile Robots on Graphs
The dispersion problem on graphs requires robots placed arbitrarily at
the nodes of an anonymous graph, where , to coordinate with each
other to reach a final configuration in which each robot is at a distinct node
of the graph. The dispersion problem is important due to its relationship to
graph exploration by mobile robots, scattering on a graph, and load balancing
on a graph. In addition, an intrinsic application of dispersion has been shown
to be the relocation of self-driven electric cars (robots) to recharge stations
(nodes). We propose three efficient algorithms to solve dispersion on graphs.
Our algorithms require bits at each robot, and steps
running time, where is the number of edges and is the degree of
the graph. The algorithms differ in whether they address the synchronous or the
asynchronous system model, and in what, where, and how data structures are
maintained.Comment: 14 page
Adaptive Algorithms for Coverage Control and Space Partitioning in Mobile Robotic Networks
This paper considers deployment problems where a mobile robotic network must
optimize its configuration in a distributed way in order to minimize a
steady-state cost function that depends on the spatial distribution of certain
probabilistic events of interest. Moreover, it is assumed that the event
location distribution is a priori unknown, and can only be progressively
inferred from the observation of the actual event occurrences. Three classes of
problems are discussed in detail: coverage control problems, spatial
partitioning problems, and dynamic vehicle routing problems. In each case,
distributed stochastic gradient algorithms optimizing the performance objective
are presented. The stochastic gradient view simplifies and generalizes
previously proposed solutions, and is applicable to new complex scenarios, such
as adaptive coverage involving heterogeneous agents. Remarkably, these
algorithms often take the form of simple distributed rules that could be
implemented on resource-limited platforms.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures. Long version of a manuscript to appear in the
Transactions on Automatic Contro
Artificial Intelligence-Based Techniques for Emerging Robotics Communication: A Survey and Future Perspectives
This paper reviews the current development of artificial intelligence (AI)
techniques for the application area of robot communication. The study of the
control and operation of multiple robots collaboratively toward a common goal
is fast growing. Communication among members of a robot team and even including
humans is becoming essential in many real-world applications. The survey
focuses on the AI techniques for robot communication to enhance the
communication capability of the multi-robot team, making more complex
activities, taking an appreciated decision, taking coordinated action, and
performing their tasks efficiently.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure
Network Functions Virtualization Architecture for Gateways for Virtualized Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks
Virtualization enables multiple applications to share the same wireless
sensor and actuator network (WSAN). However, in heterogeneous environments,
virtualized wireless sensor and actuator networks (VWSAN) raise new challenges,
such as the need for on-the-fly, dynamic, elastic, and scalable provisioning of
gateways. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is a paradigm emerging to help
tackle these new challenges. It leverages standard virtualization technology to
consolidate special-purpose network elements on commodity hardware. This
article presents NFV architecture for VWSAN gateways, in which software
instances of gateway modules are hosted in NFV infrastructure operated and
managed by a VWSAN gateway provider. We consider several VWSAN providers, each
with its own brand or combination of brands of sensors and actuators/robots.
These sensors and actuators can be accessed by a variety of applications, each
may have different interface and QoS (i.e., latency, throughput, etc.)
requirements. The NFV infrastructure allows dynamic, elastic, and scalable
deployment of gateway modules in this heterogeneous VWSAN environment.
Furthermore, the proposed architecture is flexible enough to easily allow new
sensors and actuators integration and new application domains accommodation. We
present a prototype that is built using the OpenStack platform. Besides, the
performance results are discusse
A Fog Robotics Approach to Deep Robot Learning: Application to Object Recognition and Grasp Planning in Surface Decluttering
The growing demand of industrial, automotive and service robots presents a
challenge to the centralized Cloud Robotics model in terms of privacy,
security, latency, bandwidth, and reliability. In this paper, we present a `Fog
Robotics' approach to deep robot learning that distributes compute, storage and
networking resources between the Cloud and the Edge in a federated manner. Deep
models are trained on non-private (public) synthetic images in the Cloud; the
models are adapted to the private real images of the environment at the Edge
within a trusted network and subsequently, deployed as a service for
low-latency and secure inference/prediction for other robots in the network. We
apply this approach to surface decluttering, where a mobile robot picks and
sorts objects from a cluttered floor by learning a deep object recognition and
a grasp planning model. Experiments suggest that Fog Robotics can improve
performance by sim-to-real domain adaptation in comparison to exclusively using
Cloud or Edge resources, while reducing the inference cycle time by 4\times to
successfully declutter 86% of objects over 213 attempts.Comment: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA, 201
AutoSOS: Towards Multi-UAV Systems Supporting Maritime Search and Rescue with Lightweight AI and Edge Computing
Rescue vessels are the main actors in maritime safety and rescue operations.
At the same time, aerial drones bring a significant advantage into this
scenario. This paper presents the research directions of the AutoSOS project,
where we work in the development of an autonomous multi-robot search and rescue
assistance platform capable of sensor fusion and object detection in embedded
devices using novel lightweight AI models. The platform is meant to perform
reconnaissance missions for initial assessment of the environment using novel
adaptive deep learning algorithms that efficiently use the available sensors
and computational resources on drones and rescue vessel. When drones find
potential objects, they will send their sensor data to the vessel to verity the
findings with increased accuracy. The actual rescue and treatment operation are
left as the responsibility of the rescue personnel. The drones will
autonomously reconfigure their spatial distribution to enable multi-hop
communication, when a direct connection between a drone transmitting
information and the vessel is unavailable
Graph Neural Networks for Learning Robot Team Coordination
This paper shows how Graph Neural Networks can be used for learning
distributed coordination mechanisms in connected teams of robots. We capture
the relational aspect of robot coordination by modeling the robot team as a
graph, where each robot is a node, and edges represent communication links.
During training, robots learn how to pass messages and update internal states,
so that a target behavior is reached. As a proxy for more complex problems,
this short paper considers the problem where each robot must locally estimate
the algebraic connectivity of the team's network topology.Comment: Presented at the Federated AI for Robotics Workshop,
IJCAI-ECAI/ICML/AAMAS 201
AI Challenges in Human-Robot Cognitive Teaming
Among the many anticipated roles for robots in the future is that of being a
human teammate. Aside from all the technological hurdles that have to be
overcome with respect to hardware and control to make robots fit to work with
humans, the added complication here is that humans have many conscious and
subconscious expectations of their teammates - indeed, we argue that teaming is
mostly a cognitive rather than physical coordination activity. This introduces
new challenges for the AI and robotics community and requires fundamental
changes to the traditional approach to the design of autonomy. With this in
mind, we propose an update to the classical view of the intelligent agent
architecture, highlighting the requirements for mental modeling of the human in
the deliberative process of the autonomous agent. In this article, we outline
briefly the recent efforts of ours, and others in the community, towards
developing cognitive teammates along these guidelines
Workspace Partitioning and Topology Discovery Algorithms for Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Networks
In this paper, we consider a class of workspace partitioning problems that
arise in the context of area coverage and spatial load balancing for spatially
distributed heterogeneous multi-agent networks. It is assumed that each agent
has certain directions of motion or directions for sensing and exploration that
are more preferable than others. These preferences are measured by means of
convex and anisotropic (direction-dependent) quadratic proximity metrics which
are, in general, different for each agent. These proximity metrics induce
Voronoi-like partitions of the network's workspace that are comprised of cells
which may not always be convex (or even connected) sets but are necessarily
contained in ellipsoids that are known to their corresponding agents. The main
contributions of this work are 1) a distributed algorithm for the computation
of a Voronoi-like partition of the workspace of a heterogeneous multi-agent
network and 2) a systematic process to discover the network topology induced by
the latter Voronoi-like partition. Numerical simulations that illustrate the
efficacy of the proposed algorithms are also presented.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figure
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