451 research outputs found
Active SLAM: A Review On Last Decade
This article presents a comprehensive review of the Active Simultaneous
Localization and Mapping (A-SLAM) research conducted over the past decade. It
explores the formulation, applications, and methodologies employed in A-SLAM,
particularly in trajectory generation and control-action selection, drawing on
concepts from Information Theory (IT) and the Theory of Optimal Experimental
Design (TOED). This review includes both qualitative and quantitative analyses
of various approaches, deployment scenarios, configurations, path-planning
methods, and utility functions within A-SLAM research. Furthermore, this
article introduces a novel analysis of Active Collaborative SLAM (AC-SLAM),
focusing on collaborative aspects within SLAM systems. It includes a thorough
examination of collaborative parameters and approaches, supported by both
qualitative and statistical assessments. This study also identifies limitations
in the existing literature and suggests potential avenues for future research.
This survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers seeking insights into
A-SLAM methods and techniques, offering a current overview of A-SLAM
formulation.Comment: 34 pages, 8 figures, 6 table
A Survey and Analysis of Multi-Robot Coordination
International audienceIn the field of mobile robotics, the study of multi-robot systems (MRSs) has grown significantly in size and importance in recent years. Having made great progress in the development of the basic problems concerning single-robot control, many researchers shifted their focus to the study of multi-robot coordination. This paper presents a systematic survey and analysis of the existing literature on coordination, especially in multiple mobile robot systems (MMRSs). A series of related problems have been reviewed, which include a communication mechanism, a planning strategy and a decision-making structure. A brief conclusion and further research perspectives are given at the end of the paper
Providing Predictable Performance during Network Contingencies
In IP backbone networks, packets may get dropped due to: i) lack of viable next hops when a link/router fails, ii) forwarding loops during network convergence, and iii) buffer overflows in case of congestion. Similarly, packets may be lost in wireless networks due to variations in signal strength between a pair of mobile nodes. This dissertation explores the possibility of providing a predictable performance during such network contingencies in wired backbone networks and robotic wireless networks.
First, we study the feasibility of developing a combination of local reroute and global update mechanisms that can achieve loop-free convergence, while performing disruption-free forwarding around a failed link/router, without carrying any additional information in the IP datagrams and with out needing any coordination between routers. We show that order of updates rarely matters for loop-free convergence when failure inference based fast reroute (FIFR) scheme with interface-specific forwarding is employed for dealing with link or router failures. In the rare cases where order matters, it can be coupled with progressive link metric increments to ensure loop-freedom with unordered updates of forwarding tables. We also demonstrate that, apart from providing protection against failures, FIFR can also be utilized to mitigate packet drops due to network congestion caused by micro traffic bursts.
Second, we address the problem of constructing a communication map, which encodes information on whether two robots at given locations can communicate using a wireless network. Unlike previous offline approaches that do not utilize data measured by robots, we propose an online method, utilizing Gaussian Processes, to efficiently build a communication map with multiple robots, by exploiting prior communication models that can be derived from the physical map of the environment. Our evaluation, using a team of TurtleBot 2 platforms, confirms that the proposed method requires robots to take fewer signal strength measurements and travel less distance, and yet obtain similar accuracy as methods that consider all the locations in the environment
Advancing Robot Autonomy for Long-Horizon Tasks
Autonomous robots have real-world applications in diverse fields, such as
mobile manipulation and environmental exploration, and many such tasks benefit
from a hands-off approach in terms of human user involvement over a long task
horizon. However, the level of autonomy achievable by a deployment is limited
in part by the problem definition or task specification required by the system.
Task specifications often require technical, low-level information that is
unintuitive to describe and may result in generic solutions, burdening the user
technically both before and after task completion. In this thesis, we aim to
advance task specification abstraction toward the goal of increasing robot
autonomy in real-world scenarios. We do so by tackling problems that address
several different angles of this goal. First, we develop a way for the
automatic discovery of optimal transition points between subtasks in the
context of constrained mobile manipulation, removing the need for the human to
hand-specify these in the task specification. We further propose a way to
automatically describe constraints on robot motion by using demonstrated data
as opposed to manually-defined constraints. Then, within the context of
environmental exploration, we propose a flexible task specification framework,
requiring just a set of quantiles of interest from the user that allows the
robot to directly suggest locations in the environment for the user to study.
We next systematically study the effect of including a robot team in the task
specification and show that multirobot teams have the ability to improve
performance under certain specification conditions, including enabling
inter-robot communication. Finally, we propose methods for a communication
protocol that autonomously selects useful but limited information to share with
the other robots.Comment: PhD dissertation. 160 page
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
Biologically Inspired Intelligence with Applications on Robot Navigation
Biologically inspired intelligence technique, an important embranchment of series on computational intelligence, plays a crucial role for robotics. The autonomous robot and vehicle industry has had an immense impact on our economy and society and this trend will continue with biologically inspired neural network techniques. In this chapter, multiple robots cooperate to achieve a common coverage goal efficiently, which can improve the work capacity, share the coverage tasks, and reduce the completion time by a biologically inspired intelligence technique, is addressed. In many real-world applications, the coverage task has to be completed without any prior knowledge of the environment. In this chapter, a neural dynamics approach is proposed for complete area coverage by multiple robots. A bio-inspired neural network is designed to model the dynamic environment and to guide a team of robots for the coverage task. The dynamics of each neuron in the topologically organized neural network is characterized by a shunting neural equation. Each mobile robot treats the other robots as moving obstacles. Each robot path is autonomously generated from the dynamic activity landscape of the neural network and the previous robot position. The proposed model algorithm is computationally simple. The feasibility is validated by four simulation studies
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