The AFarCloud ECSEL Project

Farming is facing many economic challenges in terms of productivity and cost-effectiveness. Labor shortage partly due to depopulation of rural areas, especially in Europe, is another challenge. Domain specific problems such as accurate identification and proper quantification of pathogens affecting plant and animal health are key factors for minimizing economical risks, and not risking human health. The ECSEL AFarCloud (Aggregate FARming in the CLOUD) project will provide a distributed platform for autonomous farming that will allow the integration and cooperation of agriculture Cyber Physical Systems in real-time in order to increase efficiency, productivity, animal health, food quality and reduce farm labour costs. This platform will be integrated with farm management software and will support monitoring and decision-making solutions based on big data and real-time data mining techniques.The AFarCloud project is funded from the ECSEL Joint Undertaking under grant agreement n° 783221, and from National funding

Scheduling for Multiple Type Objects Using POPStar Planner

In this paper, scheduling of robot cells that produce multiple object types in low volumes are considered. The challenge is to maximize the number of objects produced in a given time window as well as to adopt the  schedule for changing object types. Proposed algorithm, POPStar, is based on a partial order planner which is guided by best-first search algorithm and landmarks. The best-first search, uses heuristics to help the planner to create complete plans while minimizing the makespan. The algorithm takes landmarks, which are extracted from user's instructions given in structured English as input. Using different topologies for the landmark graphs, we show that it is possible to create schedules for changing object types, which will be processed in different stages in the robot cell. Results show that the POPStar algorithm can create and adapt schedules for robot cells with changing product types in low volume production

Adaptive Autonomy in a Search and Rescue Scenario

Adaptive autonomy plays a major role in the design of multi-robots and multi-agent systems, where the need of collaboration for achieving a common goal is of primary importance. In particular, adaptation becomes necessary to deal with dynamic environments, and scarce available resources. In this paper, a mathematical framework for modelling the agents' willingness to interact and collaborate, and a dynamic adaptation strategy for controlling the agents' behavior, which accounts for factors such as progress toward a goal and available resources for completing a task among others, are proposed. The performance of the proposed strategy is evaluated through a fire rescue scenario, where a team of simulated mobile robots need to extinguish all the detected fires and save the individuals at risk, while having limited resources. The simulations are implemented as a ROS-based multi agent system, and results show that the proposed adaptation strategy provides a more stable performance than a static collaboration policy.

Artificial grammar recognition using two spiking neural networks

In this paper we explore the feasibility of artificial (formal) grammar recognition (AGR) using spiking neural networks. A biologically inspired minicolumn architecture is designed as the basic computational unit. A network topography is defined based on the minicolumn architecture, here referred to as nodes, connected with excitatory and inhibitory connections. Nodes in the network represent unique internal states of the grammar’s finite state machine (FSM). Future work to improve the performance of the networks is discussed. The modeling framework developed can be used by neurophysiological research to implement network layouts and compare simulated performance characteristics to actual subject performance

Optimizing Parallel Task Execution for Multi-Agent Mission Planning

Multi-Agent Systems have received a tremendous amount of attention in many areas of research and industry, especially in robotics and computer science. With the increased number of agents in missions, the problem of allocation of tasks to agents arose, and it is one of the most fundamental classes of problems in robotics, formally known as the Multi-Robot Task Allocation (MRTA) problem. MRTA encapsulates numerous problem dimensions, and it aims at providing formulations and solutions to various problem configurations, i.e., complex multi-robot missions. One dimension of the MRTA problem has not caught much of the research attention. In particular, problem configurations including Multi-Task (MT) robots have been neglected. However, the increase in computational power, in robotic systems, has allowed the utilization of parallel task execution. This in turn had the benefit of allowing the creation of more complex robotic missions; however, it came at the cost of increased problem complexity.  To overcome the aforementioned problem, we introduce the distinction between physical and virtual tasks and their mutual relationship in terms of parallel task execution. To fill in the gap in the literature related to MT robot problem configurations, we provide a formalization of the mission planning problem, using MT robots, in the form of Integer Linear Programming and Constraint Programming (CP), to minimize the mission makespan. The models are validated in CPLEX and CP Optimizer on the set of benchmarks. Moreover, we provide a comprehensive performance analysis of both solvers, exploring their scalability and solution quality

GLocal : A Hybrid Approach to the Multi-Agent Mission Re-Planning Problem

Multi-robot systems can be prone to failures during plan execution, depending on the harshness of the environment they are deployed in. As a consequence, initially devised plans may no longer be feasible, and a re-planning process needs to take place to re-allocate any pending tasks. Two main approaches emerge as possible solutions, a global re-planning technique using a centralized planner that will redo the task allocation with the updated world state information, or a decentralized approach that will focus on the local plan reparation, i.e., the re-allocation of those tasks initially assigned to the failed robots.The former approach produces an overall better solution, while the latter is less computationally expensive.The goal of this paper is to exploit the benefits of both approaches, while minimizing their drawbacks. To this end, we propose a hybrid approach {that combines a centralized planner with decentralized multi-agent planning}. In case of an agent failure, the local plan reparation algorithm tries to repair the plan through agent negotiation. If it fails to re-allocate all of the pending tasks, the global re-planning algorithm is invoked, which re-allocates all unfinished tasks from all agents.The hybrid approach was compared to planner approach, and it was shown that it improves on the makespan of a mission in presence of different numbers of failures,as a consequence of the local plan reparation algorithm

Adaptive Autonomy in Wireless Sensor Networks

Moving nodes in a Mobile Wireless Sensor Network (MWSN) typically have two maintenance objectives: (i) extend the coverage of the network as long as possible to a target area, and (ii) extend the longevity of the network as much as possible. As nodes move and also route traffic in the network, their battery levels deplete differently for each node. Dead nodes lead to loss of connectivity and even to disengaging full parts of the network. Several reactive and rule-based approaches have been proposed to solve this issue by adapting redeployment to depleted nodes. However, in large networks a cooperative approach may increase performance by taking the evolution of node battery and traffic into account. In this paper, we present a hybrid agent-based architecture that addresses the problem of depleting nodes during the maintenance phase of a MWSN. Agents, each assigned to a node, collaborate and adapt their behaviour to their battery levels. The collaborative behavior is modeled through the willingness to interact abstraction, which defines when agents ask and give help to one another. Thus, depleting nodes may ask to be replaced by healthier counterparts and move to areas with less traffic or to a collection point. At the lower level, negotiations trigger a reactive navigation behaviour based on Social Potential Fields (SPF). It is shown that the proposed method improves coverage and extends network longevity in an environment without obstacles as compared to SPF alone