12,669 research outputs found
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
Multi-objective Compositions for Collision-Free Connectivity Maintenance in Teams of Mobile Robots
Compositional barrier functions are proposed in this paper to systematically
compose multiple objectives for teams of mobile robots. The objectives are
first encoded as barrier functions, and then composed using AND and OR logical
operators. The advantage of this approach is that compositional barrier
functions can provably guarantee the simultaneous satisfaction of all composed
objectives. The compositional barrier functions are applied to the example of
ensuring collision avoidance and static/dynamical graph connectivity of teams
of mobile robots. The resulting composite safety and connectivity barrier
certificates are verified experimentally on a team of four mobile robots.Comment: To appear in 55th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, December
12-14, 2016, Las Vegas, NV, US
Decentralized Connectivity-Preserving Deployment of Large-Scale Robot Swarms
We present a decentralized and scalable approach for deployment of a robot
swarm. Our approach tackles scenarios in which the swarm must reach multiple
spatially distributed targets, and enforce the constraint that the robot
network cannot be split. The basic idea behind our work is to construct a
logical tree topology over the physical network formed by the robots. The
logical tree acts as a backbone used by robots to enforce connectivity
constraints. We study and compare two algorithms to form the logical tree:
outwards and inwards. These algorithms differ in the order in which the robots
join the tree: the outwards algorithm starts at the tree root and grows towards
the targets, while the inwards algorithm proceeds in the opposite manner. Both
algorithms perform periodic reconfiguration, to prevent suboptimal topologies
from halting the growth of the tree. Our contributions are (i) The formulation
of the two algorithms; (ii) A comparison of the algorithms in extensive
physics-based simulations; (iii) A validation of our findings through
real-robot experiments.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, submitted to IROS 201
Fast multipole networks
Two prerequisites for robotic multiagent systems are mobility and
communication. Fast multipole networks (FMNs) enable both ends within a unified
framework. FMNs can be organized very efficiently in a distributed way from
local information and are ideally suited for motion planning using artificial
potentials. We compare FMNs to conventional communication topologies, and find
that FMNs offer competitive communication performance (including higher network
efficiency per edge at marginal energy cost) in addition to advantages for
mobility
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