Koordinacija više robota za učinkovite pretraživanje prostora

This paper addresses the problem of exploration of an unknown environment by developing effective exploration strategies for a team of mobile robots equipped with continuously rotating 3D scanners. The main aim of the new strategies is to reduce the exploration time of unknown environment. Unlike most of other published works, to save time, the laser scanners rotate and scan the environment while robots are in motion. Furthermore, the new strategies are able to explore large outdoor environments as a considerable reduction of the required computations, especially those required for path planning, have been achieved. Moreover, another new exploration strategy has been developed so that robots continuously replan the order to visit the remaining unexplored areas according to the new data (i.e. updated map) collected by the robot in question or by the other team members. This new extension led to further enhancements over the above mentioned ones, but with slightly higher computational costs. Finally, to assess our new exploration strategies with different levels of environment complexity, new set of experiments were conducted in environments where obstacles are distributed according to the Hilbert curve. The results of these experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed technique to effectively distribute the robots over the environment. More importantly, we show how the optimal number of robots is related to the environment complexity.Ovaj članak istražuje problem pretraživanja nepoznatog prostora razvijanjem učinkovite strategije za tim mobilnih robota s rotirajućim 3D laserskim senzorom. Glavni cilj ove nove strategije je smanjenje vremena pretraživanja nepoznatog prostora. Za razliku od većine objavljenih radova, u ovome članku, radi smanjenja vremena, laserski senzori rotiraju i snimaju prostor dok su roboti još u pokretu. Predložene strategije, pošto se njima znatno smanjuje računska složenost, pogotovo za planiranje gibanja, omogućuju pretraživanje i vanjskih prostora prostora velikih dimenzija. Nadalje, razvijena je još jedna strategija pretraživanja koja omogućuje robotima da kontinuirano replaniraju poredak kojim će posjetiti ostatak neistraženog prostora, prema novim podacima (ažuriranoj karti) prikupljenim od njih samih ili drugih članova tima. Ovo novo proširenje nadalje unaprjeđuje performanse algoritma, ali uz nešto veću računsku složenost. Kako bi se u konačnici testirale nove strategije pretraživanja na prostorima različite složenosti, provedeni su eksperimenti s preprekama raspoređenim po Hilbertovoj krivulji. Rezultati eksperimenata pokazuju učinkovitost predložene metode u prostornom raspoređivanju robota. Od posebne je važnosti istaknuti da se u članku također istražuje odnos između broja robota i kompleksnosti prostora

The RoboCup Rescue Team Deutschland1

The RoboCup Rescue competition aims at boosting research in robots and infrastructure able to help in real rescue missions. The task is to find and report victims in areas of different grades of roughness, which are currently indoor. It challenges to some extreme the mobility of robot platforms as well as the autonomy of their control and sensor interpretation software. In the 2004 competition, the Kurt3D robot was introduced, the first participant capable of mapping its environment in 3D and self-localizing in all six degrees of freedom, i.e., x, y, z positions and roll, yaw and pitch angles. In 2005, we have upgraded the system with more sensors, with a focus on speeding up the algorithms, and we have started to develop a tracked robot platform to cooperate with Kurt3D. This paper gives an introduction to the competition in general and presents main contributions of our Deutschland1 RoboCup Rescue team.