2,342 research outputs found
Decoupled Sampling-Based Motion Planning for Multiple Autonomous Marine Vehicles
There is increasing interest in the deployment and operation of multiple autonomous marine vehicles (AMVs) for a number of challenging scientific and commercial operational mission scenarios. Some of the missions, such as geotechnical surveying and 3D marine habitat mapping, require that a number of heterogeneous vehicles operate simultaneously in small areas, often in close proximity of each other. In these circumstances safety, reliability, and efficient multiple vehicle operation are key ingredients for mission success. Additionally, the deployment and operation of multiple AMVs at sea are extremely costly in terms of the logistics and human resources required for mission supervision, often during extended periods of time. These costs can be greatly minimized by automating the deployment and initial steering of a vehicle fleet to a predetermined configuration, in preparation for the ensuing mission, taking into account operational constraints. This is one of the core issues addressed in the scope of the Widely Scalable Mobile Underwater Sonar Technology project (WiMUST), an EU Horizon 2020 initiative for underwater robotics research. WiMUST uses a team of cooperative autonomous ma- rine robots, some of which towing streamers equipped with hydrophones, acting as intelligent sensing and communicat- ing nodes of a reconfigurable moving acoustic network. In WiMUST, the AMVs maintain a fixed geometric formation through cooperative navigation and motion control. Formation initialization requires that all the AMVs start from scattered positions in the water and maneuver so as to arrive at required target configuration points at the same time in a completely au- tomatic manner. This paper describes the decoupled prioritized vehicle motion planner developed in the scope of WiMUST that, together with an existing system for trajectory tracking, affords a fleet of vehicles the above capabilities, while ensuring inter- vehicle collision and streamer entanglement avoidance. Tests with a fleet of seven marine vehicles show the efficacy of the system planner developed.Peer reviewe
Decentralized 3D Collision Avoidance for Multiple UAVs in Outdoor Environments
The use of multiple aerial vehicles for autonomous missions is turning into commonplace. In many of these applications, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have to cooperate and navigate in a shared airspace, becoming 3D collision avoidance a relevant issue. Outdoor scenarios impose additional challenges: (i) accurate positioning systems are costly; (ii) communication can be unreliable or delayed; and (iii) external conditions like wind gusts affect UAVs’ maneuverability. In this paper, we present 3D-SWAP, a decentralized algorithm for 3D collision avoidance with multiple
UAVs. 3D-SWAP operates reactively without high computational requirements and allows UAVs to integrate measurements from their local sensors with positions of other teammates within communication range. We tested 3D-SWAP with our team of custom-designed UAVs. First, we used a Software-In-The-Loop simulator for system integration and evaluation. Second, we run field experiments with up to three UAVs in an outdoor scenario with uncontrolled conditions (i.e., noisy positioning systems, wind gusts, etc). We report our results and our procedures for this field experimentation.European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme No 731667 (MULTIDRONE
AlphaPilot: Autonomous Drone Racing
This paper presents a novel system for autonomous, vision-based drone racing
combining learned data abstraction, nonlinear filtering, and time-optimal
trajectory planning. The system has successfully been deployed at the first
autonomous drone racing world championship: the 2019 AlphaPilot Challenge.
Contrary to traditional drone racing systems, which only detect the next gate,
our approach makes use of any visible gate and takes advantage of multiple,
simultaneous gate detections to compensate for drift in the state estimate and
build a global map of the gates. The global map and drift-compensated state
estimate allow the drone to navigate through the race course even when the
gates are not immediately visible and further enable to plan a near
time-optimal path through the race course in real time based on approximate
drone dynamics. The proposed system has been demonstrated to successfully guide
the drone through tight race courses reaching speeds up to 8m/s and ranked
second at the 2019 AlphaPilot Challenge.Comment: Accepted at Robotics: Science and Systems 2020, associated video at
https://youtu.be/DGjwm5PZQT
A Novel Vector-Field-Based Motion Planning Algorithm for 3D Nonholonomic Robots
This paper focuses on the motion planning for mobile robots in 3D, which are
modelled by 6-DOF rigid body systems with nonholonomic kinematics constraints.
We not only specify the target position, but also bring in the requirement of
the heading direction at the terminal time, which gives rise to a new and more
challenging 3D motion planning problem. The proposed planning algorithm
involves a novel velocity vector field (VF) over the workspace, and by
following the VF, the robot can be navigated to the destination with the
specified heading direction. In order to circumvent potential collisions with
obstacles and other robots, a composite VF is designed by composing the
navigation VF and an additional VF tangential to the boundary of the dangerous
area. Moreover, we propose a priority-based algorithm to deal with the motion
coupling issue among multiple robots. Finally, numerical simulations are
conducted to verify the theoretical results
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