GUTS: Generalized Uncertainty-Aware Thompson Sampling for Multi-Agent Active Search

Robotic solutions for quick disaster response are essential to ensure minimal loss of life, especially when the search area is too dangerous or too vast for human rescuers. We model this problem as an asynchronous multi-agent active-search task where each robot aims to efficiently seek objects of interest (OOIs) in an unknown environment. This formulation addresses the requirement that search missions should focus on quick recovery of OOIs rather than full coverage of the search region. Previous approaches fail to accurately model sensing uncertainty, account for occlusions due to foliage or terrain, or consider the requirement for heterogeneous search teams and robustness to hardware and communication failures. We present the Generalized Uncertainty-aware Thompson Sampling (GUTS) algorithm, which addresses these issues and is suitable for deployment on heterogeneous multi-robot systems for active search in large unstructured environments. We show through simulation experiments that GUTS consistently outperforms existing methods such as parallelized Thompson Sampling and exhaustive search, recovering all OOIs in 80% of all runs. In contrast, existing approaches recover all OOIs in less than 40% of all runs. We conduct field tests using our multi-robot system in an unstructured environment with a search area of approximately 75,000 sq. m. Our system demonstrates robustness to various failure modes, achieving full recovery of OOIs (where feasible) in every field run, and significantly outperforming our baseline.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, 1 table, for associated video see: https://youtu.be/K0jkzdQ_j2E , to appear in International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 202

IAF Jahresbericht 2001

IAF- bzw. Forschungsjahresbericht 2001 der Fachhochschule Konstanz, Institut für Angewandte Forschun

Metrics for Dynamics: How to Improve the Behaviour of an Object Information System

If we ask about which is the main difference between modelling a system using a traditional model like the entity relationship model or an object oriented model, from our point of view the answer is that, in the first one, the processes are not located somewhere, and, in the second one, the processes (operations or methods) are encapsulated in classes. The choice of the right classes to home every operation is essential for the behaviour of the system. It is totally useless to design a well built system, according to a lot of statics metrics, if the system does not run well after. In other words, dynamic metrics allowing to evaluate the behaviour of a system when it runs are much more useful than any static metrics used to tell if the system is correctly built or not. According to this, we propose in this paper, a new approach to evaluate a priori the behaviour of a system, by taking into account the notion of event cost and the notion of time (which is obviously essential). The final goal of this approach is to deliver information on the way operations have to be placed in classes in order to get better performances when the system is running. However, the proposal of metrics is of no value if their practical use is not demonstrated, either by means of case studies taken from real projects or by controlled experiments. For this reason, an optimisation tool is being under construction in order to provide solutions to this proble

Experiences with the use of MERODE in the development of a web based application.

This article presents an experience report on using MERODE as the business modeling method for the development of a web application. MERODE has several advantages as improving the flexibility and maintainability of applications and the possibility of doing automated verification and validation on the internal consistency of the model. The application's main functionalities were managing the organisation of events and managing the general information of a research group. The developed application was monitored in order to check its flexibility and maintainability and also to verify the feasibility of using the method. The results show that in fact the flexibility and maintainability of the application were satisfactory.

An Integrated Service-Oriented Development Platform for Realization of e-Business Systems

Enterprises need to be responsive to meet dynamic businesses and requirements. Service-oriented architecture can improve e-Business applications in integration and flexibility. Therefore, service-oriented architecture has been envisioned as an appropriate computational paradigm for e-business applications. This paper proposes a multi-model driven collaborative development platform for building service-oriented e-Business systems. The platform supports service-oriented software engineering and application developments. It employs three views, i.e., business view, process view, and service view to support business and technical consultants’ operations. Consultants can collaborate from distributed sites of, e.g., clients and IT vendors to provide their clients’ with rapid system development and demonstration. The proposed platform is service-oriented and driven by three models, i.e., service meta-model, process model and business model. All of these three models are supported by a semantic reasoning engine to facilitate intelligent service discovery, process execution and business-business integration. A simple example has been used to demonstrate its functionality

Characterising aggregations with existence dependency.

Abstract: The concept of aggregation is considered as one of the basic principles in object-oriented analysis. There is however no standard definition of this concept and each object-oriented analysis method has its own definition of aggregation. The aim of this paper is not to discuss the different types of aggregation that exist. However, having assessed the complexity of the concept, we will illustrate how a basic set of formal concepts is sufficient to define of the structural and behavioral aspects of different existing flavours of aggregation. If a development method wants to offer a rich concept such as aggregation, it can define the semantics of the desired flavour of the aggregation using these core formal concepts. Analysts then have the choice to use the aggregation defined by the method or to fall back on the core concepts if a different flavour of aggregation is needed to model the situation at hand.Principles; Model;