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The determination of time-dependent collision-free shortest paths has received a fair amount of attention. Here, we study the problem of computing a time-dependent shortest path among growing discs which has been previously studied for the…
Current regulations demand that at least two exits should be available for a safe evacuation during a panic situation. Although the "faster is slower" effect is expected to take place near the exits, the evacuation time will improve because…
Robots are becoming an increasingly common part of scientific work within laboratory environments. In this paper, we investigate the problem of designing \emph{schedules} for completing a set of tasks at fixed locations with multiple robots…
This paper addresses the visibility-based pursuit-evasion problem where a team of pursuer robots operating in a two-dimensional polygonal space seek to establish visibility of an arbitrarily fast evader. This is a computationally…
A mobile robot represented by a point moving in the plane has to explore an unknown terrain with obstacles. Both the terrain and the obstacles are modeled as arbitrary polygons. We consider two scenarios: the unlimited vision, when the…
This paper describes our recent effort to use virtual reality to simulate threatening emergency evacuation scenarios in which a robot guides a person to an exit. Our prior work has demonstrated that people will follow a robot's guidance,…
A common task in robotics is unloading identical goods from a tray with rectangular grid structure. This naturally leads to the idea of programming the process at one grid position only and translating the motion to the other grid points,…
This paper addresses an optimal control problem for a robot that has to find and collect a finite number of objects and move them to a depot in minimum time. The robot has fourth-order dynamics that change instantaneously at any pick-up or…
A time-optimal problem for redundantly actuated robots moving on a specified path is a challenging problem. Although the problem is well explored and there are proposed solutions based on phase plane analysis, there are still several…
We develop and analyze algorithms for dispersing a swarm of primitive robots in an unknown environment, R. The primary objective is to minimize the makespan, that is, the time to fill the entire region. An environment is composed of pixels…
Performing highly agile acrobatic motions with a long flight phase requires perfect timing, high accuracy, and coordination of the full-body motion. To address these challenges, we present a novel approach on timings and trajectory…
We investigate the problem of creating fast evacuation plans for buildings that are modeled as grid polygons, possibly containing exponentially many cells. We study this problem in two contexts: the ``confluent'' context in which the routes…
We present an approach to task scheduling in heterogeneous multi-robot systems. In our setting, the tasks to complete require diverse skills. We assume that each robot is multi-skilled, i.e., each robot offers a subset of the possible…
Given a set of $n$ points in the plane, the Unit Disk Cover (UDC) problem asks to compute the minimum number of unit disks required to cover the points, along with a placement of the disks. The problem is NP-hard and several approximation…
The graph exploration problem requires a group of mobile robots, initially placed arbitrarily on the nodes of a graph, to work collaboratively to explore the graph such that each node is eventually visited by at least one robot. One…
This paper develops an algorithm that guides a multi-robot system in an unknown environment in search of fixed targets. The area to be scanned contains an unknown number of convex obstacles of unknown size and shape. The algorithm covers…
In this work, we initiate the research about the Gathering problem for robots with limited viewing range in the three-dimensional Euclidean space. In the Gathering problem, a set of initially scattered robots is required to gather at the…
Searching for a line on the plane with $n$ unit speed robots is a classic online problem that dates back to the 50's, and for which competitive ratio upper bounds are known for every $n\geq 1$. In this work we improve the best lower bound…
As mobile robots and autonomous vehicles become increasingly prevalent in human-centred environments, there is a need to control the risk of collision. Perceptual modules, for example machine vision, provide uncertain estimates of object…
We consider a swarm of $n$ robots in \mathbb{R}^d. The robots are oblivious, disoriented (no common coordinate system/compass), and have limited visibility (observe other robots up to a constant distance). The basic formation task gathering…