Related papers: Ant Robotics: Covering Continuous Domains by Multi…
Connectivity maintenance plays a key role in achieving a desired global behavior among a swarm of robots. However, connectivity maintenance in realistic environments is hampered by lack of computation resources, low communication bandwidth,…
Whether a robot can perform some specific task depends on several aspects, including the robot's sensors and the plans it possesses. We are interested in search algorithms that treat plans and sensor designs jointly, yielding…
We propose and numerically analyze a PDE model of ant foraging behavior. Ant foraging is a prime example of individuals following simple behavioral rules based on local information producing complex, organized and ``intelligent'' strategies…
A decomposition-based coverage control scheme is proposed for multi-agent, persistent surveillance missions operating in a communication-constrained, dynamic environment. The proposed approach decouples high-level task assignment from…
We consider the problem of detecting, in the visual sensing data stream of an autonomous mobile robot, semantic patterns that are unusual (i.e., anomalous) with respect to the robot's previous experience in similar environments. These…
We present a novel framework for estimating accident-prone regions in everyday indoor scenes, aimed at improving real-time risk awareness in service robots operating in human-centric environments. As robots become integrated into daily…
Industrial robots play an increasingly important role in a growing number of fields. For example, robotics is used to increase productivity while reducing costs in various aspects of manufacturing. Since robots are often set up in…
Given a set of co-located mobile robots in an unknown anonymous graph, the robots must relocate themselves in distinct graph nodes to solve the dispersion problem. In this paper, we consider the dispersion problem for silent robots…
For robots that have the capability to interact with the physical environment through their end effectors, understanding the surrounding scenes is not merely a task of image classification or object recognition. To perform actual tasks, it…
This paper formally defines a robot system, including its sensing and actuation components, as a general, topological dynamical system. The focus is on determining general conditions under which various environments in which the robot can…
In this work, we address the problem of multi-robot adaptive coverage, where teams of robots perform dynamic sampling by continuously adjusting their positions to collect data in an environment. This task can be challenging, particularly…
One of the goals of active information acquisition using multi-robot teams is to keep the relative uncertainty in each region at the same level to maintain identical acquisition quality (e.g., consistent target detection) in all the…
The Ant Colony System (ACS) is, next to Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and the MAX-MIN Ant System (MMAS), one of the most efficient metaheuristic algorithms inspired by the behavior of ants. In this article we present three novel parallel…
The mine detection in an unexplored area is an optimization problem where multiple mines, randomly distributed throughout an area, need to be discovered and disarmed in a minimum amount of time. We propose a strategy to explore an unknown…
Mobile robots, especially unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), are of increasing interest for surveillance and disaster response scenarios. We consider the problem of multi-robot persistent surveillance with connectivity constraints where…
Networked robotic systems, such as connected vehicle platoons, can improve the safety and efficiency of transportation networks by allowing for high-speed coordination. To enable such coordination, these systems rely on networked…
While today's robots are able to perform sophisticated tasks, they can only act on objects they have been trained to recognize. This is a severe limitation: any robot will inevitably see new objects in unconstrained settings, and thus will…
We study the problem of rendezvous of two mobile agents starting at distinct locations in an unknown graph. The agents have distinct labels and walk in synchronous steps. However the graph is unlabelled and the agents have no means of…
This paper investigates the task-driven exploration of unknown environments with mobile sensors communicating compressed measurements. The sensors explore the area and transmit their compressed data to another robot, assisting it to reach…
Current technological advances open up new opportunities for bringing human-machine interaction to a new level of human-centered cooperation. In this context, a key issue is the semantic understanding of the environment in order to enable…