Decentralized Multi-Agent Planning for Multirotors:a Fully online and Communication Latency Robust Approach

There are many industrial, commercial and social applications for multi-agent planning for multirotors such as autonomous agriculture, infrastructure inspection and search and rescue. Thus, improving on the state-of-the-art of multi-agent planning to make it a viable real-world solution is of great benefit. In this work, we propose a new method for multi-agent planning in a static environment that improves our previous work by making it fully online as well as robust to communication latency. The proposed framework generates a global path and a Safe Corridor to avoid static obstacles in an online fashion (generated offline in our previous work). It then generates a time-aware Safe Corridor which takes into account the future positions of other agents to avoid intra-agent collisions. The time-aware Safe Corridor is given with a local reference trajectory to an MIQP (Mixed-Integer Quadratic Problem)/MPC (Model Predictive Control) solver that outputs a safe and optimal trajectory. The planning frequency is adapted to account for communication delays. The proposed method is fully online, real-time, decentralized, and synchronous. It is compared to 3 recent state-of-the-art methods in simulations. It outperforms all methods in robustness and safety as well as flight time. It also outperforms the only other state-of-the-art latency robust method in computation time

3D multi-robot patrolling with a two-level coordination strategy

Teams of UGVs patrolling harsh and complex 3D environments can experience interference and spatial conflicts with one another. Neglecting the occurrence of these events crucially hinders both soundness and reliability of a patrolling process. This work presents a distributed multi-robot patrolling technique, which uses a two-level coordination strategy to minimize and explicitly manage the occurrence of conflicts and interference. The first level guides the agents to single out exclusive target nodes on a topological map. This target selection relies on a shared idleness representation and a coordination mechanism preventing topological conflicts. The second level hosts coordination strategies based on a metric representation of space and is supported by a 3D SLAM system. Here, each robot path planner negotiates spatial conflicts by applying a multi-robot traversability function. Continuous interactions between these two levels ensure coordination and conflicts resolution. Both simulations and real-world experiments are presented to validate the performances of the proposed patrolling strategy in 3D environments. Results show this is a promising solution for managing spatial conflicts and preventing deadlocks

Rule-Based Lloyd Algorithm for Multi-Robot Motion Planning and Control with Safety and Convergence Guarantees

This paper presents a distributed rule-based Lloyd algorithm (RBL) for multi-robot motion planning and control. The main limitations of the basic Loyd-based algorithm (LB) concern deadlock issues and the failure to address dynamic constraints effectively. Our contribution is twofold. First, we show how RBL is able to provide safety and convergence to the goal region without relying on communication between robots, nor neighbors control inputs, nor synchronization between the robots. We considered both case of holonomic and non-holonomic robots with control inputs saturation. Second, we show that the Lloyd-based algorithm (without rules) can be successfully used as a safety layer for learning-based approaches, leading to non-negligible benefits. We further prove the soundness, reliability, and scalability of RBL through extensive simulations, an updated comparison with the state of the art, and experimental validations on small-scale car-like robots

3D Multi-Robot Exploration with a Two-Level Coordination Strategy and Prioritization

This work presents a 3D multi-robot exploration framework for a team of UGVs moving on uneven terrains. The framework was designed by casting the two-level coordination strategy presented in [1] into the context of multi-robot exploration. The resulting distributed exploration technique minimizes and explicitly manages the occurrence of conflicts and interferences in the robot team. Each robot selects where to scan next by using a receding horizon next-best-view approach [2]. A sampling-based tree is directly expanded on segmented traversable regions of the terrain 3D map to generate the candidate next viewpoints. During the exploration, users can assign locations with higher priorities on-demand to steer the robot exploration toward areas of interest. The proposed framework can be also used to perform coverage tasks in the case a map of the environment is a priori provided as input. An open-source implementation is available online

Game-Theoretic and Set-Based Methods for Safe Autonomous Vehicles on Shared Roads

Autonomous vehicle (AV) technology promises safer, cleaner, and more efficient transportation, as well as improved mobility for the young, elderly, and disabled. One of the biggest challenges of AV technology is the development and high-confidence verification and validation (V&V) of decision and control systems for AVs to safely and effectively operate on roads shared with other road users (including human-driven vehicles). This dissertation investigates game-theoretic and set-based methods to address this challenge. Firstly, this dissertation presents two game-theoretic approaches to modeling the interactions among drivers/vehicles on shared roads. The first approach is based on the "level-k reasoning" human behavioral model and focuses on the representation of heterogeneous driving styles of real-world drivers. The second approach is based on a novel leader-follower game formulation inspired by the "right-of-way" traffic rules and focuses on the modeling of driver intents and their resulting behaviors under such traffic rules and etiquette. Both approaches lead to interpretable and scalable driver/vehicle interaction models. This dissertation then introduces an application of these models to fast and economical virtual V&V of AV control systems. Secondly, this dissertation presents a high-level control framework for AVs to safely and effectively interact with other road users. The framework is based on a constrained partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) formulation of the AV control problem, which is then solved using a tailored model predictive control algorithm called POMDP-MPC. The major advantages of this control framework include its abilities to handle interaction uncertainties and provide an explicit probabilistic safety guarantee under such uncertainties. Finally, this dissertation introduces the Action Governor (AG), which is a novel add-on scheme to a nominal control loop for formally enforcing pointwise-in-time state and control constraints. The AG operates based on set-theoretic techniques and online optimization. Theoretical properties and computational approaches of the AG for discrete-time linear systems subject to non-convex exclusion-zone avoidance constraints are established. The use of the AG for enhancing AV safety is illustrated through relevant simulation case studies.PHDAerospace EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/167992/1/nanli_1.pd

Efficient, collision-free multi-robot navigation in an environment abstraction framework

Industrial automation deploys a continuously increasing amount of mobile robots in favor of classical linear conveyor systems for material flow handling in manufacturing and intralogistics. This increases flexibility by handling a larger variety of goods, improves scalability by adapting the fleet size to varying system loads, and enhances fault tolerance by avoiding single points of failure. However, it also raises the need for efficient, collision-free multi-robot navigation. This core problem is first precisely modeled in a form that differs from existing approaches specifically in terms of application relevance and structured algorithmic treatability. Collision-free trajectories for the mobile robots between given start and goal locations are sought so that the number of goals reached per time is as high as possible. Based on this, a decoupled solution called the Collaborative Local Planning Framework (CLPF), is designed and implemented, which, in contrast to existing solutions, aims at avoiding deadlocks with the greatest possible concurrency. Moreover, this solution includes the handling of dynamic inputs consisting of both moving and non-moving robots. For testing, performance analysis, and optimization, due to the complexity of multi-robot systems, the use of simulation is common. However, this also creates a gap between real and simulated robots. These issues can be reduced by using several different simulators---albeit with the disadvantage of further increasing complexity. For this purpose, the Robot Experimentation Framework (REF) is introduced to write robotic experiments with a unified interface that can be run on multiple simulators and also on real hardware. It facilitates the creation of experiments for performance assessment, (parameter) optimization and runtime analysis. The framework has proven its effectiveness throughout this thesis. Lastly, experimental proof of the viability of the solution is provided based on a case study of a complete (simulated) assembly system of decentralized autonomous agents for the production of highly individualized automobiles. This integrates all developed concepts into a holistic application of industrial automation. Detailed evaluations of more than 800 000 solved scenarios with more than 5 700 000 processed goals have experimentally proven the robustness and reliability of the developed concepts. Robots have never crashed into each other in any of the conducted experiments, empirically proving the claimed safety guarantees. A fault-tolerance analysis of the decentralized assembly system has experimentally proven its resilience to failures at workstations and, thus, specifically revealed an advantage over linear conveyor systems

Autonomous Database Management at Scale: Automated Tuning, Performance Diagnosis, and Resource Decentralization

Database administration has always been a challenging task, and is becoming even more difficult with the rise of public and private clouds. Today, many enterprises outsource their database operation to cloud service providers (CSPs) in order to reduce operating costs. CSPs, now tasked with managing an extremely large number of database instances, cannot simply rely on database administrators. In fact, humans have become a bottleneck in the scalability and profitability of cloud offerings. This has created a massive demand for building autonomous databases—systems that operate with little or zero human supervision. While autonomous databases have gained much attention in recent years in both academia and industry, many of the existing techniques remain limited to automating parameter tuning, backup/recovery, and monitoring. Consequently, there is much to be done before realizing a fully autonomous database. This dissertation examines and offers new automation techniques for three specific areas of modern database management. 1. Automated Tuning – We propose a new generation of physical database designers that are robust against uncertainty in future workloads. Given the rising popularity of approximate databases, we also develop an optimal, hybrid sampling strategy that enables efficient join processing on offline samples, a long-standing open problem in approximate query processing. 2. Performance Diagnosis – We design practical tools and algorithms for assisting database administrators in quickly and reliably diagnosing performance problems in their transactional databases. 3. Resource Decentralization – To achieve autonomy among database components in a shared environment, we propose a highly efficient, starvation-free, and fully decentralized distributed lock manager for distributed database clusters.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/153349/1/dyoon_1.pd