14,788 research outputs found
Experiments in cooperative human multi-robot navigation
In this paper, we consider the problem of a
group of autonomous mobile robots and a human moving
coordinately in a real-world implementation. The group
moves throughout a dynamic and unstructured environment.
The key problem to be solved is the inclusion of a human in a
real multi-robot system and consequently the multiple robot
motion coordination. We present a set of performance metrics
(system efficiency and percentage of time in formation) and a
novel flexible formation definition whereby a formation
control strategy both in simulation and in real-world
experiments of a human multi-robot system is presented. The
formation control proposed is stable and effective by means of
its uniform dispersion, cohesion and flexibility
A robot swarm assisting a human fire-fighter
Emergencies in industrial warehouses are a major concern for fire-fighters. The large dimensions, together with the development of dense smoke that drastically reduces visibility, represent major challenges. The GUARDIANS robot swarm is designed to assist fire-fighters in searching a large warehouse. In this paper we discuss the technology developed for a swarm of robots assisting fire-fighters. We explain the swarming algorithms that provide the functionality by which the robots react to and follow humans while no communication is required. Next we discuss the wireless communication system, which is a so-called mobile ad-hoc network. The communication network provides also the means to locate the robots and humans. Thus, the robot swarm is able to provide guidance information to the humans. Together with the fire-fighters we explored how the robot swarm should feed information back to the human fire-fighter. We have designed and experimented with interfaces for presenting swarm-based information to human beings
Role Playing Learning for Socially Concomitant Mobile Robot Navigation
In this paper, we present the Role Playing Learning (RPL) scheme for a mobile
robot to navigate socially with its human companion in populated environments.
Neural networks (NN) are constructed to parameterize a stochastic policy that
directly maps sensory data collected by the robot to its velocity outputs,
while respecting a set of social norms. An efficient simulative learning
environment is built with maps and pedestrians trajectories collected from a
number of real-world crowd data sets. In each learning iteration, a robot
equipped with the NN policy is created virtually in the learning environment to
play itself as a companied pedestrian and navigate towards a goal in a socially
concomitant manner. Thus, we call this process Role Playing Learning, which is
formulated under a reinforcement learning (RL) framework. The NN policy is
optimized end-to-end using Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO), with
consideration of the imperfectness of robot's sensor measurements. Simulative
and experimental results are provided to demonstrate the efficacy and
superiority of our method
Symbiotic Navigation in Multi-Robot Systems with Remote Obstacle Knowledge Sharing
Large scale operational areas often require multiple service robots for coverage and task parallelism. In such scenarios, each robot keeps its individual map of the environment and serves specific areas of the map at different times. We propose a knowledge sharing mechanism for multiple robots in which one robot can inform other robots about the changes in map, like path blockage, or new static obstacles, encountered at specific areas of the map. This symbiotic information sharing allows the robots to update remote areas of the map without having to explicitly navigate those areas, and plan efficient paths. A node representation of paths is presented for seamless sharing of blocked path information. The transience of obstacles is modeled to track obstacles which might have been removed. A lazy information update scheme is presented in which only relevant information affecting the current task is updated for efficiency. The advantages of the proposed method for path planning are discussed against traditional method with experimental results in both simulation and real environments
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