Related papers: How Best to Handle a Dicey Situation
Creating robots that can perform general-purpose service tasks in a human-populated environment has been a longstanding grand challenge for AI and Robotics research. One particularly valuable skill that is relevant to a wide variety of…
The dynamic allocation problem, also known as the `multi-armed bandit' problem, simulates a situation in which an agent is faced with a tradeoff between actions that yield an immediate reward and actions whose benefits can only be perceived…
In a robotic mobile fulfillment system, robots bring shelves, called pods, with storage items from the storage area to pick stations. At every pick station there is a person -- the picker -- who takes parts from the pod and packs them into…
In this work, we demonstrate how differentiable stochastic sampling techniques developed in the context of deep Reinforcement Learning can be used to perform efficient parameter inference over stochastic, simulation-based, forward models.…
Packing problems are in general NP-hard, even for simple cases. Since now there are no highly efficient algorithms available for solving packing problems. The two-dimensional bin packing problem is about packing all given rectangular items,…
Dynamic dispatching is one of the core problems for operation optimization in traditional industries such as mining, as it is about how to smartly allocate the right resources to the right place at the right time. Conventionally, the…
Processing data collected by a network of agents often boils down to solving an optimization problem. The distributed nature of these problems calls for methods that are, themselves, distributed. While most collaborative learning problems…
This work studies rearrangement problems involving the sorting of robots or objects in stack-like containers, which can be accessed only from one side. Two scenarios are considered: one where every robot or object needs to reach a…
The task allocation problem in multi-robot systems (MRTA) is an NP-hard problem whose viable solutions are usually found by heuristic algorithms. Considering the increasing need of improvement on logistics, the use of robots for increasing…
This thesis explores a particular class of distributed optimization methods for various separable resource allocation problems, which are of high interest in a wide array of multi-agent settings. A distinctly motivating application for this…
The necklace splitting problem is a classic problem in fair division with many applications, including data-informed fair hash maps. We extend necklace splitting to a dynamic setting, allowing for relocation, insertion, and deletion of…
In-hand manipulation of tools using dexterous hands in real-world is an underexplored problem in the literature. In addition to more complex geometry and larger size of the tools compared to more commonly used objects like cubes or…
This paper proposes an analytical framework for modelling resource contention in multi-robot systems, where the travel times and task durations are uncertain. It uses several approximation methods to quickly and accurately calculate the…
We formulate and analyze a generic sequential resource access problem arising in a variety of engineering fields, where a user disposes a number of heterogeneous computing, communication, or storage resources, each characterized by the…
A central problem in business concerns the optimal allocation of limited resources to a set of available tasks, where the payoff of these tasks is inherently uncertain. In credit card fraud detection, for instance, a bank can only assign a…
We consider the classical scheduling problem on parallel identical machines to minimize the makespan, and achieve the following results under the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH) 1. The scheduling problem on a constant number $m$ of…
We quantify the threat of network adversaries to inducing \emph{network overload} through \emph{routing attacks}, where a subset of network nodes are hijacked by an adversary. We develop routing attacks on the hijacked nodes for two…
We study the question of existence and fast computation of fair and efficient allocations of indivisible resources among agents with additive valuations. As such allocations may not exist for arbitrary instances, we ask if they exist for…
We consider the facility location problem in the one-dimensional setting where each facility can serve a limited number of agents from the algorithmic and mechanism design perspectives. From the algorithmic perspective, we prove that the…
Dynamic material handling (DMH) involves the assignment of dynamically arriving material transporting tasks to suitable vehicles in real time for minimising makespan and tardiness. In real-world scenarios, historical task records are…