Evacuation from a Disk for Robots with Asymmetric Communication

We consider evacuation of two robots from an Exit placed at an unknown location on the perimeter of a unit (radius) disk. The robots can move with max speed 1 and start at the center of the disk at the same time. We consider a new communication model, known as the SR model, in which the robots have communication faults as follows: one of the robots is a Sender and can only send wirelessly at any distance, while the other is a Receiver in that it can only receive wirelessly from any distance. The communication status of each robot is known to the other robot. In addition, both robots can exchange messages when they are co-located, which is known as Face-to-Face (F2F) model. There have been several studies in the literature concerning the evacuation time when both robots may employ either F2F or Wireless (WiFi) communication. The SR communication model diverges from these two in that the two robots themselves have differing communication capabilities. We study the evacuation time, namely the time it takes until the last robot reaches the Exit, and show that the evacuation time in the SR model is strictly between the F2F and the WiFi models. The main part of our technical contribution is also an evacuation algorithm in which two cooperating robots accomplish the task in worst-case time at most ?+2. Interesting features of the proposed algorithm are the asymmetry inherent in the resulting trajectories, as well as that the robots do not move at full speed for the entire duration of their trajectories

Robust Environmental Mapping by Mobile Sensor Networks

Constructing a spatial map of environmental parameters is a crucial step to preventing hazardous chemical leakages, forest fires, or while estimating a spatially distributed physical quantities such as terrain elevation. Although prior methods can do such mapping tasks efficiently via dispatching a group of autonomous agents, they are unable to ensure satisfactory convergence to the underlying ground truth distribution in a decentralized manner when any of the agents fail. Since the types of agents utilized to perform such mapping are typically inexpensive and prone to failure, this results in poor overall mapping performance in real-world applications, which can in certain cases endanger human safety. This paper presents a Bayesian approach for robust spatial mapping of environmental parameters by deploying a group of mobile robots capable of ad-hoc communication equipped with short-range sensors in the presence of hardware failures. Our approach first utilizes a variant of the Voronoi diagram to partition the region to be mapped into disjoint regions that are each associated with at least one robot. These robots are then deployed in a decentralized manner to maximize the likelihood that at least one robot detects every target in their associated region despite a non-zero probability of failure. A suite of simulation results is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method when compared to existing techniques.Comment: accepted to icra 201

Trust Repair in Human-Swarm Teams+

Swarm robots are coordinated via simple control laws to generate emergent behaviors such as flocking, rendezvous, and deployment. Human-swarm teaming has been widely proposed for scenarios, such as human-supervised teams of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for disaster rescue, UAV and ground vehicle cooperation for building security, and soldier-UAV teaming in combat. Effective cooperation requires an appropriate level of trust, between a human and a swarm. When an UAV swarm is deployed in a real-world environment, its performance is subject to real-world factors, such as system reliability and wind disturbances. Degraded performance of a robot can cause undesired swarm behaviors, decreasing human trust. This loss of trust, in turn, can trigger human intervention in UAVs' task executions, decreasing cooperation effectiveness if inappropriate. Therefore, to promote effective cooperation we propose and test a trust-repairing method (Trust-repair) restoring performance and human trust in the swarm to an appropriate level by correcting undesired swarm behaviors. Faulty swarms caused by both external and internal factors were simulated to evaluate the performance of the Trust-repair algorithm in repairing swarm performance and restoring human trust. Results show that Trust-repair is effective in restoring trust to a level intermediate between normal and faulty conditions

Triangle Evacuation of 2 Agents in the Wireless Model

The input to the \emph{Triangle Evacuation} problem is a triangle $ABC$. Given a starting point $S$ on the perimeter of the triangle, a feasible solution to the problem consists of two unit-speed trajectories of mobile agents that eventually visit every point on the perimeter of $ABC$. The cost of a feasible solution (evacuation cost) is defined as the supremum over all points $T$ of the time it takes that $T$ is visited for the first time by an agent plus the distance of $T$ to the other agent at that time. Similar evacuation type problems are well studied in the literature covering the unit circle, the $\ell_p$ unit circle for $p\geq 1$, the square, and the equilateral triangle. We extend this line of research to arbitrary non-obtuse triangles. Motivated by the lack of symmetry of our search domain, we introduce 4 different algorithmic problems arising by letting the starting edge and/or the starting point $S$ on that edge to be chosen either by the algorithm or the adversary. To that end, we provide a tight analysis for the algorithm that has been proved to be optimal for the previously studied search domains, as well as we provide lower bounds for each of the problems. Both our upper and lower bounds match and extend naturally the previously known results that were established only for equilateral triangles

Compatibility of convergence algorithms for autonomous mobile robots

We investigate autonomous mobile robots in the Euclidean plane. A robot has a function called target function to decide the destination from the robots' positions, and operates in Look-Compute-Move cycles, i.e., identifies the robots' positions, computes the destination by the target function, and then moves there. Robots may have different target functions. Let $\Phi$ and $\Pi$ be a set of target functions and a problem, respectively. If the robots whose target functions are chosen from $\Phi$ always solve $\Pi$, we say that $\Phi$ is compatible with respect to $\Pi$. If $\Phi$ is compatible with respect to $\Pi$, every target function $\phi \in \Phi$ is an algorithm for $\Pi$ (in the conventional sense). Note that even if both $\phi$ and $\phi'$ are algorithms for $\Pi$, $\{ \phi, \phi' \}$ may not be compatible with respect to $\Pi$. From the view point of compatibility, we investigate the convergence, the fault tolerant ($n,f$)-convergence (FC($f$)), the fault tolerant ($n,f$)-convergence to $f$ points (FC($f$)-PO), the fault tolerant ($n,f$)-convergence to a convex $f$-gon (FC($f$)-CP), and the gathering problems, assuming crash failures. As a result, we see that these problems are classified into three groups: The convergence, the FC(1), the FC(1)-PO, and the FC($f$)-CP compose the first group: Every set of target functions which always shrink the convex hull of a configuration is compatible. The second group is composed of the gathering and the FC($f$)-PO for $f \geq 2$: No set of target functions which always shrink the convex hull of a configuration is compatible. The third group, the FC($f$) for $f \geq 2$, is placed in between. Thus, the FC(1) and the FC(2), the FC(1)-PO and the FC(2)-PO, and the FC(2) and the FC(2)-PO are respectively in different groups, despite that the FC(1) and the FC(1)-PO are in the first group

Distributed Systems and Mobile Computing

The book is about Distributed Systems and Mobile Computing. This is a branch of Computer Science devoted to the study of systems whose components are in different physical locations and have limited communication capabilities. Such components may be static, often organized in a network, or may be able to move in a discrete or continuous environment. The theoretical study of such systems has applications ranging from swarms of mobile robots (e.g., drones) to sensor networks, autonomous intelligent vehicles, the Internet of Things, and crawlers on the Web. The book includes five articles. Two of them are about networks: the first one studies the formation of networks by agents that interact randomly and have the ability to form connections; the second one is a study of clustering models and algorithms. The three remaining articles are concerned with autonomous mobile robots operating in continuous space. One article studies the classical gathering problem, where all robots have to reach a common location, and proposes a fast algorithm for robots that are endowed with a compass but have limited visibility. The last two articles deal with the evacuations problem, where two robots have to locate an exit point and evacuate a region in the shortest possible time

Using haptic feedback in human swarm interaction

A swarm of robots is a large group of individual agents that autonomously coordinate via local control laws. Their emergent behavior allows simple robots to accomplish complex tasks. Since missions may have complex objectives that change dynamically due to environmental and mission changes, human control and influence over the swarm is needed. The field of Human Swarm Interaction (HSI) is young, with few user studies, and even fewer papers focusing on giving non-visual feedback to the operator. The authors will herein present a background of haptics in robotics and swarms and two studies that explore various conditions under which haptic feedback may be useful in HSI. The overall goal of the studies is to explore the effectiveness of haptic feedback in the presence of other visual stimuli about the swarm system. The findings show that giving feedback about nearby obstacles using a haptic device can improve performance, and that a combination of feedback from obstacle forces via the visual and haptic channels provide the best performance

Toward A Mobile Agent Relay Network

Although wireless communication provides connectivity where hardwired links are difficult or impractical, it is still hindered by the environmental conditions where the communicators reside. Signal loss over large distances or because of intervening obstacles can be mitigated by increasing the user\u27s transmission power or adding repeater nodes between the users. Unfortunately, increasing the signal strength strains limited power resources and increases the likelihood of eavesdropping. Stationary repeaters are impractical for highly mobile users in dangerous environments. While mobile relay nodes might be a preferred solution, a centralized control scheme saps bandwidth from important traffic and introduces a single point of failure at the control station. An alternative solution is to create a Mobile Agent Relay Network (MARN). Each autonomous node in the MARN decides where to move to maintain the network connectivity using only locally-available information from onboard sensors and communication with in-range neighbor nodes. This is achieved by borrowing concepts from flocking behaviors that motivates our agents to maintain equal distance between its neighboring nodes. In addition, each agent maintains a filtered list of previously visited locations that provided best connection. This thesis takes the first steps toward realizing a MARN by providing mobile relay agents. Each model-based reflex agent is guided by a modified flocking behavior which considers only trustworthy neighbors and uses a Bayesian model to aggregate observations and shared reputation. The relay agents are able to build a network and maintain connectivity for their users. In this work, MARN agent algorithms are evaluated in a simulated unobstructed environment with stationary users. The system behavior is explored under both benign conditions and with varying numbers of misbehaving nodes

Near-Optimal Motion Planning Algorithms Via A Topological and Geometric Perspective

Motion planning is a fundamental problem in robotics, which involves finding a path for an autonomous system, such as a robot, from a given source to a destination while avoiding collisions with obstacles. The properties of the planning space heavily influence the performance of existing motion planning algorithms, which can pose significant challenges in handling complex regions, such as narrow passages or cluttered environments, even for simple objects. The problem of motion planning becomes deterministic if the details of the space are fully known, which is often difficult to achieve in constantly changing environments. Sampling-based algorithms are widely used among motion planning paradigms because they capture the topology of space into a roadmap. These planners have successfully solved high-dimensional planning problems with a probabilistic-complete guarantee, i.e., it guarantees to find a path if one exists as the number of vertices goes to infinity. Despite their progress, these methods have failed to optimize the sub-region information of the environment for reuse by other planners. This results in re-planning overhead at each execution, affecting the performance complexity for computation time and memory space usage. In this research, we address the problem by focusing on the theoretical foundation of the algorithmic approach that leverages the strengths of sampling-based motion planners and the Topological Data Analysis methods to extract intricate properties of the environment. The work contributes a novel algorithm to overcome the performance shortcomings of existing motion planners by capturing and preserving the essential topological and geometric features to generate a homotopy-equivalent roadmap of the environment. This roadmap provides a mathematically rich representation of the environment, including an approximate measure of the collision-free space. In addition, the roadmap graph vertices sampled close to the obstacles exhibit advantages when navigating through narrow passages and cluttered environments, making obstacle-avoidance path planning significantly more efficient. The application of the proposed algorithms solves motion planning problems, such as sub-optimal planning, diverse path planning, and fault-tolerant planning, by demonstrating the improvement in computational performance and path quality. Furthermore, we explore the potential of these algorithms in solving computational biology problems, particularly in finding optimal binding positions for protein-ligand or protein-protein interactions. Overall, our work contributes a new way to classify routes in higher dimensional space and shows promising results for high-dimensional robots, such as articulated linkage robots. The findings of this research provide a comprehensive solution to motion planning problems and offer a new perspective on solving computational biology problems