12,682 research outputs found
Impossibility of Gathering, a Certification
Recent advances in Distributed Computing highlight models and algorithms for
autonomous swarms of mobile robots that self-organise and cooperate to solve
global objectives. The overwhelming majority of works so far considers handmade
algorithms and proofs of correctness. This paper builds upon a previously
proposed formal framework to certify the correctness of impossibility results
regarding distributed algorithms that are dedicated to autonomous mobile robots
evolving in a continuous space. As a case study, we consider the problem of
gathering all robots at a particular location, not known beforehand. A
fundamental (but not yet formally certified) result, due to Suzuki and
Yamashita, states that this simple task is impossible for two robots executing
deterministic code and initially located at distinct positions. Not only do we
obtain a certified proof of the original impossibility result, we also get the
more general impossibility of gathering with an even number of robots, when any
two robots are possibly initially at the same exact location.Comment: 10
A distributed optimization framework for localization and formation control: applications to vision-based measurements
Multiagent systems have been a major area of research for the last 15 years. This interest has been motivated by tasks that can be executed more rapidly in a collaborative manner or that are nearly impossible to carry out otherwise. To be effective, the agents need to have the notion of a common goal shared by the entire network (for instance, a desired formation) and individual control laws to realize the goal. The common goal is typically centralized, in the sense that it involves the state of all the agents at the same time. On the other hand, it is often desirable to have individual control laws that are distributed, in the sense that the desired action of an agent depends only on the measurements and states available at the node and at a small number of neighbors. This is an attractive quality because it implies an overall system that is modular and intrinsically more robust to communication delays and node failures
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
Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)consists in the concurrent
construction of a model of the environment (the map), and the estimation of the
state of the robot moving within it. The SLAM community has made astonishing
progress over the last 30 years, enabling large-scale real-world applications,
and witnessing a steady transition of this technology to industry. We survey
the current state of SLAM. We start by presenting what is now the de-facto
standard formulation for SLAM. We then review related work, covering a broad
set of topics including robustness and scalability in long-term mapping, metric
and semantic representations for mapping, theoretical performance guarantees,
active SLAM and exploration, and other new frontiers. This paper simultaneously
serves as a position paper and tutorial to those who are users of SLAM. By
looking at the published research with a critical eye, we delineate open
challenges and new research issues, that still deserve careful scientific
investigation. The paper also contains the authors' take on two questions that
often animate discussions during robotics conferences: Do robots need SLAM? and
Is SLAM solved
Probabilistic and Distributed Control of a Large-Scale Swarm of Autonomous Agents
We present a novel method for guiding a large-scale swarm of autonomous
agents into a desired formation shape in a distributed and scalable manner. Our
Probabilistic Swarm Guidance using Inhomogeneous Markov Chains (PSG-IMC)
algorithm adopts an Eulerian framework, where the physical space is partitioned
into bins and the swarm's density distribution over each bin is controlled.
Each agent determines its bin transition probabilities using a
time-inhomogeneous Markov chain. These time-varying Markov matrices are
constructed by each agent in real-time using the feedback from the current
swarm distribution, which is estimated in a distributed manner. The PSG-IMC
algorithm minimizes the expected cost of the transitions per time instant,
required to achieve and maintain the desired formation shape, even when agents
are added to or removed from the swarm. The algorithm scales well with a large
number of agents and complex formation shapes, and can also be adapted for area
exploration applications. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this proposed
swarm guidance algorithm by using results of numerical simulations and hardware
experiments with multiple quadrotors.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Robotic
Technical report on Optimization-Based Bearing-Only Visual Homing with Applications to a 2-D Unicycle Model
We consider the problem of bearing-based visual homing: Given a mobile robot
which can measure bearing directions with respect to known landmarks, the goal
is to guide the robot toward a desired "home" location. We propose a control
law based on the gradient field of a Lyapunov function, and give sufficient
conditions for global convergence. We show that the well-known Average Landmark
Vector method (for which no convergence proof was known) can be obtained as a
particular case of our framework. We then derive a sliding mode control law for
a unicycle model which follows this gradient field. Both controllers do not
depend on range information. Finally, we also show how our framework can be
used to characterize the sensitivity of a home location with respect to noise
in the specified bearings. This is an extended version of the conference paper
[1].Comment: This is an extender version of R. Tron and K. Daniilidis, "An
optimization approach to bearing-only visual homing with applications to a
2-D unicycle model," in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and
Automation, 2014, containing additional proof
Social learning mechanisms compared in a simple environment
Social learning can be adaptive, but little is known about the underlying mechanisms. Many researchers have focused on imitation but this may have led to simpler mechanisms being underestimated. We demonstrate in simulation that imitative learning is not always the best strategy for a group-living animal, and that the effectiveness of any such strategy will depend on details of the environment and the animal's lifestyle. We show that observations of behavioural convergence or "traditions" might suggest effective social learning, but are meaningless considered alone
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