Safe, Remote-Access Swarm Robotics Research on the Robotarium

This paper describes the development of the Robotarium -- a remotely accessible, multi-robot research facility. The impetus behind the Robotarium is that multi-robot testbeds constitute an integral and essential part of the multi-agent research cycle, yet they are expensive, complex, and time-consuming to develop, operate, and maintain. These resource constraints, in turn, limit access for large groups of researchers and students, which is what the Robotarium is remedying by providing users with remote access to a state-of-the-art multi-robot test facility. This paper details the design and operation of the Robotarium as well as connects these to the particular considerations one must take when making complex hardware remotely accessible. In particular, safety must be built in already at the design phase without overly constraining which coordinated control programs the users can upload and execute, which calls for minimally invasive safety routines with provable performance guarantees.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, 3 code samples, 72 reference

Experiments of posture estimation on vehicles using wearable acceleration sensors

In this paper, we study methods to estimate drivers' posture in vehicles using acceleration data of wearable sensor and conduct a field test. Recently, sensor technologies have been progressed. Solutions of safety management to analyze vital data acquired from wearable sensor and judge work status are proposed. To prevent huge accidents, demands for safety management of bus and taxi are high. However, acceleration of vehicles is added to wearable sensor in vehicles, and there is no guarantee to estimate drivers' posture accurately. Therefore, in this paper, we study methods to estimate driving posture using acceleration data acquired from T-shirt type wearable sensor hitoe, conduct field tests and implement a sample application.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, The 3rd IEEE International Conference on Big Data Security on Cloud (BigDataSecurity 2017), pp.14-17, Beijing, May 201

Agent and cyber-physical system based self-organizing and self-adaptive intelligent shopfloor

The increasing demand of customized production results in huge challenges to the traditional manufacturing systems. In order to allocate resources timely according to the production requirements and to reduce disturbances, a framework for the future intelligent shopfloor is proposed in this paper. The framework consists of three primary models, namely the model of smart machine agent, the self-organizing model, and the self-adaptive model. A cyber-physical system for manufacturing shopfloor based on the multiagent technology is developed to realize the above-mentioned function models. Gray relational analysis and the hierarchy conflict resolution methods were applied to achieve the self-organizing and self-adaptive capabilities, thereby improving the reconfigurability and responsiveness of the shopfloor. A prototype system is developed, which has the adequate flexibility and robustness to configure resources and to deal with disturbances effectively. This research provides a feasible method for designing an autonomous factory with exception-handling capabilities

Realising Team-Working in the Field: An Agent-based Approach

Multi-agent systems technology is applied to enable co-operation between mobile workers in the field, minimising user intervention and increasing reachability. A component-based approach is taken to simplify the management of deployed co-operation services. A Personal Assistant running on a mobile device is introduced to show how an intelligent and autonomous agent can increase the utility of users during workforce co-operation processes. Finally, a real world trial of the technology by network installation and maintenance engineers in the UK is described. Some technical issues revealed during the trial are discussed, as is the impact of the technology on the business process

Incentive-compatible route coordination of crowdsourced resources

Technical ReportWith the recent trend in crowdsourcing, i.e., using the power of crowds to assist in satisfying demand, the pool of resources suitable for GeoPresen-ce-capable systems has expanded to include already roaming devices, such as mobile phones, and moving vehicles. We envision an environment, in which the motion of these crowdsourced mobile resources is coordinated, according to their preexisting schedules to satisfy geo-temporal demand on a mobility field. In this paper, we propose an incentive compatible route coordination mechanism for crowdsourced resources, in which participating mobile agents satisfy geo-temporal requests in return for monetary rewards. We define the Flexible Route Coordination (FRC) problem, in which an agent’s flexibility is exploited to maximize the coverage of a mobility field, with an objective to maximize the revenue collected from satisfied paying requests. Given that the FRC problem is NP-hard, we define an optimal algorithm to plan the route of a single agent on a graph with evolving labels, then we use that algorithm to define a 1-approximation algorithm to solve the 2 problem in its general model, with multiple agents. Moreover, we define an incentive compatible, rational, and cash-positive payment mechanism, which guarantees that an agent’s truthfulness about its flexibility is an ex-post Nash equilibrium strategy. Finally, we analyze the proposed mechanisms theoretically, and evaluate their performance experimentally using real mobility traces from urban environments

OpenKnowledge at work: exploring centralized and decentralized information gathering in emergency contexts

Real-world experience teaches us that to manage emergencies, efficient crisis response coordination is crucial; ICT infrastructures are effective in supporting the people involved in such contexts, by supporting effective ways of interaction. They also should provide innovative means of communication and information management. At present, centralized architectures are mostly used for this purpose; however, alternative infrastructures based on the use of distributed information sources, are currently being explored, studied and analyzed. This paper aims at investigating the capability of a novel approach (developed within the European project OpenKnowledge1) to support centralized as well as decentralized architectures for information gathering. For this purpose we developed an agent-based e-Response simulation environment fully integrated with the OpenKnowledge infrastructure and through which existing emergency plans are modelled and simulated. Preliminary results show the OpenKnowledge capability of supporting the two afore-mentioned architectures and, under ideal assumptions, a comparable performance in both cases

What’s in it for me? Incentive-compatible route coordination of crowdsourced resources

With the recent trend in crowdsourcing, i.e., using the power of crowds to assist in satisfying demand, the pool of resources suitable for GeoPresence-capable systems has expanded to include already roaming devices, such as mobile phones, and moving vehicles. We envision an environment, in which the motion of these crowdsourced mobile resources is coordinated, according to their preexisting schedules to satisfy geo-temporal demand on a mobility field. In this paper, we propose an incentive compatible route coordination mechanism for crowdsourced resources, in which participating mobile agents satisfy geo-temporal requests in return for monetary rewards. We define the Flexible Route Coordination (FRC) problem, in which an agent’s flexibility is exploited to maximize the coverage of a mobility field, with an objective to maximize the revenue collected from satisfied paying requests. Given that the FRC problem is NP-hard, we define an optimal algorithm to plan the route of a single agent on a graph with evolving labels, then we use that algorithm to define a 1/2-approximation algorithm to solve the problem in its general model, with multiple agents. Moreover, we define an incentive compatible, rational, and cash-positive payment mechanism, which guarantees that an agent’s truthfulness about its flexibility is an ex-post Nash equilibrium strategy. Finally, we analyze the proposed mechanisms theoretically, and evaluate their performance experimentally using real mobility traces from urban environments.Supported in part by NSF Grants, #1430145, #1414119, #1347522, #1239021, and #1012798

A Software Suite for the Control and the Monitoring of Adaptive Robotic Ecologies

Adaptive robotic ecologies are networks of heterogeneous robotic devices (sensors, actuators, automated appliances) pervasively embedded in everyday environments, where they learn to cooperate towards the achievement of complex tasks. While their flexibility makes them an increasingly popular way to improve a system’s reliability, scalability, robustness and autonomy, their effective realisation demands integrated control and software solutions for the specification, integration and management of their highly heterogeneous and computational constrained components. In this extended abstract we briefly illustrate the characteristic requirements dictated by robotic ecologies, discuss our experience in developing adaptive robotic ecologies, and provide an overview of the specific solutions developed as part of the EU FP7 RUBICON Project