Smooth and Collision-Free Navigation for Multiple Mobile Robots and Video Game Characters

The navigation of multiple mobile robots or virtual agents through environments containing static and dynamic obstacles to specified goal locations is an important problem in mobile robotics, many video games, and simulated environments. Moreover, technological advances in mobile robot hardware and video games consoles have allowed increasing numbers of mobile robots or virtual agents to navigate shared environments simultaneously. However, coordinating the navigation of large groups of mobile robots or virtual agents remains a difficult task. Kinematic and dynamic constraints and the effects of sensor and actuator uncertainty exaggerate the challenge of navigating multiple physical mobile robots, and video games players demand plausible motion and an ever increasing visual fidelity of virtual agents without sacrificing frame rate. We present new methods for navigating multiple mobile robots or virtual agents through shared environments, each using formulations based on velocity obstacles. These include algorithms that allow navigation through environments in two-dimensional or three-dimensional workspaces containing both static and dynamic obstacles without collisions or oscillations. Each mobile robot or virtual agent senses its surroundings and acts independently, without central coordination or inter-communication with its neighbors, implicitly assuming the neighbors use the same navigation strategy based on the notion of reciprocity. We use the position, velocity, and physical extent of neighboring mobile robots or virtual agents to compute their future trajectories to avoid collisions locally and show that, in principle, it is possible to theoretically guarantee that the motion of each mobile robot or virtual agent is smooth. Moreover, we demonstrate direct, collision-free, and oscillation-free navigation in experiments using physical iRobot Create mobile robots, simulations of multiple differential-drive robots or simple-airplanes, and video games levels containing hundreds of virtual agents.Doctor of Philosoph

Mobile Robots

The objective of this book is to cover advances of mobile robotics and related technologies applied for multi robot systems' design and development. Design of control system is a complex issue, requiring the application of information technologies to link the robots into a single network. Human robot interface becomes a demanding task, especially when we try to use sophisticated methods for brain signal processing. Generated electrophysiological signals can be used to command different devices, such as cars, wheelchair or even video games. A number of developments in navigation and path planning, including parallel programming, can be observed. Cooperative path planning, formation control of multi robotic agents, communication and distance measurement between agents are shown. Training of the mobile robot operators is very difficult task also because of several factors related to different task execution. The presented improvement is related to environment model generation based on autonomous mobile robot observations

Playing Cassino with Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning algorithms have been used to create game-playing agents for various games—mostly, deterministic games such as chess, shogi, and Go. This study used Deep-Q reinforcement learning to create an agent that plays a non-deterministic card game, Cassino. This agent’s performance was compared against the performance of a Cassino mobile app. Results showed that the trained models did not perform well and had trouble training around build actions which are important in Cassino. Future research could experiment with other reinforcement learning algorithms to see if they are better at training around build actions

Platform for creating multiplayer location based games

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 70-71).TaleBlazer is a platform that allows users to create location-based games for their mobile device. Using a block-based programming language, game designers can control the behavior of agents that interact with the game players as they walk around in the world with their GPS enabled device. This thesis describes the design decisions and implementation of the repository server which holds stores the games, the mobile client used to play TaleBlazer games, the blocks programming language used to control the agents and players in the game, and the multiplayer server that allows players to interact within the same game world. The experience teaching a workshop with students who used TaleBlazer is described in addition to areas for future development of the project.by Michael Paul Medlock-Walton.M.Eng

Game Theoretic Approaches to Massive Data Processing in Wireless Networks

Wireless communication networks are becoming highly virtualized with two-layer hierarchies, in which controllers at the upper layer with tasks to achieve can ask a large number of agents at the lower layer to help realize computation, storage, and transmission functions. Through offloading data processing to the agents, the controllers can accomplish otherwise prohibitive big data processing. Incentive mechanisms are needed for the agents to perform the controllers' tasks in order to satisfy the corresponding objectives of controllers and agents. In this article, a hierarchical game framework with fast convergence and scalability is proposed to meet the demand for real-time processing for such situations. Possible future research directions in this emerging area are also discussed

Mean-Field-Type Games in Engineering

A mean-field-type game is a game in which the instantaneous payoffs and/or the state dynamics functions involve not only the state and the action profile but also the joint distributions of state-action pairs. This article presents some engineering applications of mean-field-type games including road traffic networks, multi-level building evacuation, millimeter wave wireless communications, distributed power networks, virus spread over networks, virtual machine resource management in cloud networks, synchronization of oscillators, energy-efficient buildings, online meeting and mobile crowdsensing.Comment: 84 pages, 24 figures, 183 references. to appear in AIMS 201

Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation

This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion