Adoption of vehicular ad hoc networking protocols by networked robots

This paper focuses on the utilization of wireless networking in the robotics domain. Many researchers have already equipped their robots with wireless communication capabilities, stimulated by the observation that multi-robot systems tend to have several advantages over their single-robot counterparts. Typically, this integration of wireless communication is tackled in a quite pragmatic manner, only a few authors presented novel Robotic Ad Hoc Network (RANET) protocols that were designed specifically with robotic use cases in mind. This is in sharp contrast with the domain of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET). This observation is the starting point of this paper. If the results of previous efforts focusing on VANET protocols could be reused in the RANET domain, this could lead to rapid progress in the field of networked robots. To investigate this possibility, this paper provides a thorough overview of the related work in the domain of robotic and vehicular ad hoc networks. Based on this information, an exhaustive list of requirements is defined for both types. It is concluded that the most significant difference lies in the fact that VANET protocols are oriented towards low throughput messaging, while RANET protocols have to support high throughput media streaming as well. Although not always with equal importance, all other defined requirements are valid for both protocols. This leads to the conclusion that cross-fertilization between them is an appealing approach for future RANET research. To support such developments, this paper concludes with the definition of an appropriate working plan

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

Viewfinder: final activity report

The VIEW-FINDER project (2006-2009) is an 'Advanced Robotics' project that seeks to apply a semi-autonomous robotic system to inspect ground safety in the event of a fire. Its primary aim is to gather data (visual and chemical) in order to assist rescue personnel. A base station combines the gathered information with information retrieved from off-site sources. The project addresses key issues related to map building and reconstruction, interfacing local command information with external sources, human-robot interfaces and semi-autonomous robot navigation. The VIEW-FINDER system is a semi-autonomous; the individual robot-sensors operate autonomously within the limits of the task assigned to them, that is, they will autonomously navigate through and inspect an area. Human operators monitor their operations and send high level task requests as well as low level commands through the interface to any nodes in the entire system. The human interface has to ensure the human supervisor and human interveners are provided a reduced but good and relevant overview of the ground and the robots and human rescue workers therein

Cooperative localization for mobile agents: a recursive decentralized algorithm based on Kalman filter decoupling

We consider cooperative localization technique for mobile agents with communication and computation capabilities. We start by provide and overview of different decentralization strategies in the literature, with special focus on how these algorithms maintain an account of intrinsic correlations between state estimate of team members. Then, we present a novel decentralized cooperative localization algorithm that is a decentralized implementation of a centralized Extended Kalman Filter for cooperative localization. In this algorithm, instead of propagating cross-covariance terms, each agent propagates new intermediate local variables that can be used in an update stage to create the required propagated cross-covariance terms. Whenever there is a relative measurement in the network, the algorithm declares the agent making this measurement as the interim master. By acquiring information from the interim landmark, the agent the relative measurement is taken from, the interim master can calculate and broadcast a set of intermediate variables which each robot can then use to update its estimates to match that of a centralized Extended Kalman Filter for cooperative localization. Once an update is done, no further communication is needed until the next relative measurement

Interoperability in a Heterogeneous Team of Search and Rescue Robots

Search and rescue missions are complex operations. A disaster scenario is generally unstructured, time‐varying and unpredictable. This poses several challenges for the successful deployment of unmanned technology. The variety of operational scenarios and tasks lead to the need for multiple robots of different types, domains and sizes. A priori planning of the optimal set of assets to be deployed and the definition of their mission objectives are generally not feasible as information only becomes available during mission. The ICARUS project responds to this challenge by developing a heterogeneous team composed by different and complementary robots, dynamically cooperating as an interoperable team. This chapter describes our approach to multi‐robot interoperability, understood as the ability of multiple robots to operate together, in synergy, enabling multiple teams to share data, intelligence and resources, which is the ultimate objective of ICARUS project. It also includes the analysis of the relevant standardization initiatives in multi‐robot multi‐domain systems, our implementation of an interoperability framework and several examples of multi‐robot cooperation of the ICARUS robots in realistic search and rescue missions

Decentralized Autonomous Navigation Strategies for Multi-Robot Search and Rescue

In this report, we try to improve the performance of existing approaches for search operations in multi-robot context. We propose three novel algorithms that are using a triangular grid pattern, i.e., robots certainly go through the vertices of a triangular grid during the search procedure. The main advantage of using a triangular grid pattern is that it is asymptotically optimal in terms of the minimum number of robots required for the complete coverage of an arbitrary bounded area. We use a new topological map which is made and shared by robots during the search operation. We consider an area that is unknown to the robots a priori with an arbitrary shape, containing some obstacles. Unlike many current heuristic algorithms, we give mathematically proofs of convergence of the algorithms. The computer simulation results for the proposed algorithms are presented using a simulator of real robots and environment. We evaluate the performance of the algorithms via experiments with real robots. We compare the performance of our own algorithms with three existing algorithms from other researchers. The results demonstrate the merits of our proposed solution. A further study on formation building with obstacle avoidance for a team of mobile robots is presented in this report. We propose a decentralized formation building with obstacle avoidance algorithm for a group of mobile robots to move in a defined geometric configuration. Furthermore, we consider a more complicated formation problem with a group of anonymous robots; these robots are not aware of their position in the final configuration and need to reach a consensus during the formation process. We propose a randomized algorithm for the anonymous robots that achieves the convergence to a desired configuration with probability 1. We also propose a novel obstacle avoidance rule, used in the formation building algorithm.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1402.5188 by other author