Improving Situational Awareness in RoboFlag

Situational awareness in competitive games has started to attract increasing attention in the control community. It studies how a robot identifies, understands and predicts the significant factors around it, which is essential for effective decision making and performance in any complex and dynamic environment. In this thesis, we investigate the situational awareness problems in RoboFlag, a highly dynamic testbed that comprises a mixture of offense and defense games between two robotic teams. To improve situational awareness in RoboFlag, we want to solve two main problems. (1) Real-time position estimation given limited sensing capability. (2) Optimal decision-making strategy based on position estimation. Monte Carlo Localization (MCL), a statistical method based on particle representations of probability densities moving sequentially in discrete time, has been shown as an effective and time-efficient method for reliable position estimation, especially when the dynamics of the system and the environment are nonlinear and non-Gaussian, such as RoboFlag. In this thesis, a dynamic weight map, Hospitability Map (H-Map), that measures the ability of a target to move and maneuver at each location of the field, has been applied to MCL to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of MCL in resampling phase. Empirical results illustrate that H-Map based MCL method improves situational awareness in Roboflag by providing reliable position prediction and enhancing decisionmaking performance.</p

Recent Research in Cooperative Control of Multivehicle Systems

This paper presents a survey of recent research in cooperative control of multivehicle systems, using a common mathematical framework to allow different methods to be described in a unified way. The survey has three primary parts: an overview of current applications of cooperative control, a summary of some of the key technical approaches that have been explored, and a description of some possible future directions for research. Specific technical areas that are discussed include formation control, cooperative tasking, spatiotemporal planning, and consensus

World Robot Challenge 2020 -- Partner Robot: A Data-Driven Approach for Room Tidying with Mobile Manipulator

Tidying up a household environment using a mobile manipulator poses various challenges in robotics, such as adaptation to large real-world environmental variations, and safe and robust deployment in the presence of humans.The Partner Robot Challenge in World Robot Challenge (WRC) 2020, a global competition held in September 2021, benchmarked tidying tasks in the real home environments, and importantly, tested for full system performances.For this challenge, we developed an entire household service robot system, which leverages a data-driven approach to adapt to numerous edge cases that occur during the execution, instead of classical manual pre-programmed solutions. In this paper, we describe the core ingredients of the proposed robot system, including visual recognition, object manipulation, and motion planning. Our robot system won the second prize, verifying the effectiveness and potential of data-driven robot systems for mobile manipulation in home environments

Estado del arte en robótica cooperativa aplicada al rescate de víctimas

The present article, in the context of a documentary research carried out and interpreted to be taken as a baseline in research for the ROMA Autonomous Mobile Robotics Group of the Francisco José de Caldas District University, describes the state of art of the applied RC to the rescue of victims. The revision is established chronologically in the last fifteen years; in Latin America; and focused mainly in Colombia. They are used as sources: The Google Schoolar database, and articles from the electronic engineering journals indexed for the year 2017 in COLCIENCIAS. As a product thrown, a particular model of communication technology used in CR is presented in the Colombian context.El presente artículo, en el contexto de una investigación documental realizada e interpretada para que fuera tomada como línea de base en investigaciones para el grupo de Robótica Móvil Autónoma ROMA de la Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas, describe el estado de arte de la RC aplicada al rescate de víctimas. Se establece cronológicamente la revisión en los últimos quince años; en Latinoamérica; y enfocada principalmente en Colombia. Se utilizan como fuentes: la base de datos Google Schoolar, y artículos de las revistas de Ingeniería electrónica indexadas para el año 2017 en COLCIENCIAS. Como producto arrojado se presenta un modelo particular de la tecnología de comunicación empleada en RC en el contexto colombiano