42,603 research outputs found
Robust area coverage with connectivity maintenance
Robot swarms herald the ability to solve complex tasks using a large collection of simple devices. However, engineering a robotic swarm is far from trivial, with a major hurdle being the definition of the control laws leading to the desired globally coordinated behavior. Communication is a key element for coordination and it is considered one of the current most important challenges for swarm robotics. In this paper, we study the problem of maintaining robust swarm connectivity while performing a coverage task based on the Voronoi tessellation of an area of interest. We implement our methodology in a team of eight Khepera IV robots. With the assumptions that robots have a limited sensing and communication range - and cannot rely on centralized processing - we propose a tri-objective control law that outperforms other simpler strategies (e.g. a potential-based coverage) in terms of network connectivity, robustness to failure, and area coverage
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
Long-Range Communications in Unlicensed Bands: the Rising Stars in the IoT and Smart City Scenarios
Connectivity is probably the most basic building block of the Internet of
Things (IoT) paradigm. Up to know, the two main approaches to provide data
access to the \emph{things} have been based either on multi-hop mesh networks
using short-range communication technologies in the unlicensed spectrum, or on
long-range, legacy cellular technologies, mainly 2G/GSM, operating in the
corresponding licensed frequency bands. Recently, these reference models have
been challenged by a new type of wireless connectivity, characterized by
low-rate, long-range transmission technologies in the unlicensed sub-GHz
frequency bands, used to realize access networks with star topology which are
referred to a \emph{Low-Power Wide Area Networks} (LPWANs). In this paper, we
introduce this new approach to provide connectivity in the IoT scenario,
discussing its advantages over the established paradigms in terms of
efficiency, effectiveness, and architectural design, in particular for the
typical Smart Cities applications
A Message Passing Strategy for Decentralized Connectivity Maintenance in Agent Removal
In a multi-agent system, agents coordinate to achieve global tasks through
local communications. Coordination usually requires sufficient information
flow, which is usually depicted by the connectivity of the communication
network. In a networked system, removal of some agents may cause a
disconnection. In order to maintain connectivity in agent removal, one can
design a robust network topology that tolerates a finite number of agent
losses, and/or develop a control strategy that recovers connectivity. This
paper proposes a decentralized control scheme based on a sequence of
replacements, each of which occurs between an agent and one of its immediate
neighbors. The replacements always end with an agent, whose relocation does not
cause a disconnection. We show that such an agent can be reached by a local
rule utilizing only some local information available in agents' immediate
neighborhoods. As such, the proposed message passing strategy guarantees the
connectivity maintenance in arbitrary agent removal. Furthermore, we
significantly improve the optimality of the proposed scheme by incorporating
-criticality (i.e. the criticality of an agent in its
-neighborhood).Comment: 9 pages, 9 figure
Stochastic Analysis of a Churn-Tolerant Structured Peer-to-Peer Scheme
We present and analyze a simple and general scheme to build a churn
(fault)-tolerant structured Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network. Our scheme shows how to
"convert" a static network into a dynamic distributed hash table(DHT)-based P2P
network such that all the good properties of the static network are guaranteed
with high probability (w.h.p). Applying our scheme to a cube-connected cycles
network, for example, yields a degree connected network, in which
every search succeeds in hops w.h.p., using messages,
where is the expected stable network size. Our scheme has an constant
storage overhead (the number of nodes responsible for servicing a data item)
and an overhead (messages and time) per insertion and essentially
no overhead for deletions. All these bounds are essentially optimal. While DHT
schemes with similar guarantees are already known in the literature, this work
is new in the following aspects:
(1) It presents a rigorous mathematical analysis of the scheme under a
general stochastic model of churn and shows the above guarantees;
(2) The theoretical analysis is complemented by a simulation-based analysis
that validates the asymptotic bounds even in moderately sized networks and also
studies performance under changing stable network size;
(3) The presented scheme seems especially suitable for maintaining dynamic
structures under churn efficiently. In particular, we show that a spanning tree
of low diameter can be efficiently maintained in constant time and logarithmic
number of messages per insertion or deletion w.h.p.
Keywords: P2P Network, DHT Scheme, Churn, Dynamic Spanning Tree, Stochastic
Analysis
An Autonomous Surface Vehicle for Long Term Operations
Environmental monitoring of marine environments presents several challenges:
the harshness of the environment, the often remote location, and most
importantly, the vast area it covers. Manual operations are time consuming,
often dangerous, and labor intensive. Operations from oceanographic vessels are
costly and limited to open seas and generally deeper bodies of water. In
addition, with lake, river, and ocean shoreline being a finite resource,
waterfront property presents an ever increasing valued commodity, requiring
exploration and continued monitoring of remote waterways. In order to
efficiently explore and monitor currently known marine environments as well as
reach and explore remote areas of interest, we present a design of an
autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) with the power to cover large areas, the
payload capacity to carry sufficient power and sensor equipment, and enough
fuel to remain on task for extended periods. An analysis of the design and a
discussion on lessons learned during deployments is presented in this paper.Comment: In proceedings of MTS/IEEE OCEANS, 2018, Charlesto
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