Related papers: Minimizing Movement: Fixed-Parameter Tractability

Marginalization -- summing a function over all assignments to a subset of its inputs -- is a fundamental computational problem with applications from probabilistic inference to formal verification. Despite its computational hardness in…

Self-stabilization is a versatile technique to withstand any transient fault in a distributed system. Mobile robots (or agents) are one of the emerging trends in distributed computing as they mimic autonomous biologic entities. The…

We consider the problem of controlling the movement of multiple cooperating agents so as to minimize an uncertainty metric associated with a finite number of targets. In a one-dimensional mission space, we adopt an optimal control framework…

Emerging reconfigurable optical communication technologies allow to enhance datacenter topologies with demand-aware links optimized towards traffic patterns. This paper studies the algorithmic problem of jointly optimizing topology and…

The subject of this work is the patrolling of an environment with the aid of a team of autonomous agents. We consider both the design of open-loop trajectories with optimal properties, and of distributed control laws converging to optimal…

Motion planning for multi-jointed robots is challenging. Due to the inherent complexity of the problem, most existing works decompose motion planning as easier subproblems. However, because of the inconsistent performance metrics, only…

Effective motion planning in high dimensional spaces is a long-standing open problem in robotics. One class of traditional motion planning algorithms corresponds to potential-based motion planning. An advantage of potential based motion…

We investigate the problem of optimally observing a finite set of targets using a mobile agent over an infinite time horizon. The agent is tasked to move in a network-constrained structure to gather information so as to minimize the…

We present a method for reducing the treewidth of a graph while preserving all the minimal $s-t$ separators. This technique turns out to be very useful for establishing the fixed-parameter tractability of constrained separation and…

The paper describes results on two components of a research program focused on motion-based communication mediated by the dynamics of a control system. Specifically we are interested in how mobile agents engaged in a shared activity such as…

Synchronous dynamic systems are well-established models that have been used to capture a range of phenomena in networks, including opinion diffusion, spread of disease and product adoption. We study the three most notable problems in…

Spatial multi-agency has been receiving growing attention from researchers exploring many of the aspects and modalities of this phenomenon. The aim is to develop the theoretical background needed for a multitude of applications involving…

This paper introduces a graph-based, potential-guided method for path planning problems in unknown environments, where obstacles are unknown until the robots are in close proximity to the obstacle locations. Inspired by optimal transport…

We consider a wireless network with a set of transmitter-receiver pairs, or links, that share a common channel, and address the problem of emptying finite traffic volume from the transmitters in minimum time. This, so called, minimum-time…

Composite systems are large complex systems con- sisting of interconnected agents (subsystems). Agents in a com- posite system interact with each other towards performing an in- tended goal. Controllability is essential to achieve desired…

We propose an optimal control framework for persistent monitoring problems where the objective is to control the movement of mobile agents to minimize an uncertainty metric in a given mission space. For a single agent in a one-dimensional…

Coordinating agents through hazardous environments, such as aid-delivering drones navigating conflict zones or field robots traversing deployment areas filled with obstacles, poses fundamental planning challenges. We introduce and analyze…

We consider the well-studied problem of finding a spanning tree with minimum average distance between vertex pairs (called a MAD tree). This is a classic network design problem which is known to be NP-hard. While approximation algorithms…

A topological theory initiated recently by the author uses methods of algebraic topology to estimate numerically the character of instabilities arising in motion planning algorithms. The present paper studies random motion planning…

Targeted marketing policies target different customers with different marketing actions. While most research has focused on training targeting policies without managerial constraints, in practice, many firms face managerial constraints when…