Related papers: L\'evy Flight Foraging Hypothesis-based Autonomous…

The search for hidden targets is a fundamental problem in many areas of science, engineering, and other fields. Studies of search processes often adopt a probabilistic framework, in which a searcher randomly explores a spatial domain for a…

Our goal in this paper is to plan the motion of a robot in a partitioned environment with dynamically changing, locally sensed rewards. We assume that arbitrary assumptions on the reward dynamics can be given. The robot aims to accomplish a…

Task allocation is an important problem for robot swarms to solve, allowing agents to reduce task completion time by performing tasks in a distributed fashion. Existing task allocation algorithms often assume prior knowledge of task…

In this work, we present a novel distributed method for constructing an occupancy grid map of an unknown environment using a swarm of robots with global localization capabilities and limited inter-robot communication. The robots explore the…

It is essential for a robot to be able to detect revisits or loop closures for long-term visual navigation.A key insight explored in this work is that the loop-closing event inherently occurs sparsely, that is, the image currently being…

This paper reviews exploration techniques in deep reinforcement learning. Exploration techniques are of primary importance when solving sparse reward problems. In sparse reward problems, the reward is rare, which means that the agent will…

In recent years Landmark Complexes have been successfully employed for localization-free and metric-free autonomous exploration using a group of sensing-limited and communication-limited robots in a GPS-denied environment. To ensure rapid…

Search-based motion planning algorithms have been widely utilized for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, deploying these algorithms on real UAVs faces challenges due to limited onboard computational resources. The algorithms struggle…

We focus on the task of object manipulation to an arbitrary goal pose, in which a robot is supposed to pick an assigned object to place at the goal position with a specific orientation. However, limited by the execution space of the…

We revisit the linear search problem where a robot, initially placed at the origin on an infinite line, tries to locate a stationary target placed at an unknown position on the line. Unlike previous studies, in which the robot travels along…

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…

Mastering deep reinforcement learning (DRL) proves challenging in tasks featuring scant rewards. These limited rewards merely signify whether the task is partially or entirely accomplished, necessitating various exploration actions before…

We propose a new model for formalizing reward collection problems on graphs with dynamically generated rewards which may appear and disappear based on a stochastic model. The *robot routing problem* is modeled as a graph whose nodes are…

We study analytically an intermittent search process in one dimension. There is an immobile target at the origin and a searcher undergoes a discrete time jump process starting at $x_0\geq0$, where successive jumps are drawn independently…

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are increasingly used to survey coral reefs, yet efficiently locating specific coral species of interest remains difficult: target species are often sparsely distributed across the reef, and an AUV with…

This paper proposes a novel mission planning algorithm for autonomous robots that selects an optimal waypoint sequence from a predefined set to maximize total reward while satisfying obstacle avoidance, state, input, derivative, mission…

Multi-goal reinforcement learning (RL) aims to qualify the agent to accomplish multi-goal tasks, which is of great importance in learning scalable robotic manipulation skills. However, reward engineering always requires strenuous efforts in…

Robot swarms, systems of many robots that operate in a distributed fashion, have many applications in areas such as search-and-rescue, natural disaster response, and self-assembly. Several of these applications can be abstracted to the…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Learning optimal policies in sparse rewards settings is difficult as the learning agent has little to no feedback on the quality of its actions. In these situations, a good strategy is to focus on exploration, hopefully leading to the…