Related papers: Combining Geometric and Information-Theoretic Appr…
Recent research in multi-robot exploration and mapping has focused on sampling environmental fields, which are typically modeled using the Gaussian process (GP). Existing information-theoretic exploration strategies for learning GP-based…
Very distinct strategies can be deployed to recognize and characterize an unknown environment or a shape. A recent and promising approach, especially in robotics, is to reduce the complexity of the exploratory units to a minimum. Here, we…
This paper addresses an autonomous exploration problem in which a mobile sensor, placed in a previously unseen search area, utilizes an information-theoretic navigation cost function to dynamically select the next sensing action, i.e.,…
In this report, we try to improve the performance of existing approaches for search operations in multi-robot context. We propose three novel algorithms that are using a triangular grid pattern, i.e., robots certainly go through the…
Robots with the ability to balance time against the thoroughness of search have the potential to provide time-critical assistance in applications such as search and rescue. Current advances in ergodic coverage-based search methods have…
Adaptive information sampling approaches enable efficient selection of mobile robot's waypoints through which accurate sensing and mapping of a physical process, such as the radiation or field intensity, can be obtained. This paper analyzes…
Autonomous exploration in unknown environments requires estimating the information gain of an action to guide planning decisions. While prior approaches often compute information gain at discrete waypoints, pathwise integration offers a…
Collision avoidance in unknown obstacle-cluttered environments may not always be feasible. This paper focuses on an emerging paradigm shift in which potential collisions with the environment can be harnessed instead of being avoided…
This work presents a fully integrated tree-based combined exploration-planning algorithm: Exploration-RRT (ERRT). The algorithm is focused on providing real-time solutions for local exploration in a fully unknown and unstructured…
At the heart of path-planning methods for autonomous robotic exploration is a heuristic which encourages exploring unknown regions of the environment. Such heuristics are typically computed using frontier-based or information-theoretic…
A map merging component is crucial for the proper functionality of a multi-robot system performing exploration, since it provides the means to integrate and distribute the most important information carried by the agents: the…
A state space representation of an environment is a classic and yet powerful tool used by many autonomous robotic systems for efficient and often optimal solution planning. However, designing these representations with high performance is…
Recent papers have shown optimally-competitive on-line strategies for a robot traveling from a point $s$ to a point $t$ in certain unknown geometric environments. We consider the question: Having gained some partial information about the…
In this paper, we consider the problem of partitioning a polygon into a set of connected disjoint sub-polygons, each of which covers an area of a specific size. The work is motivated by terrain covering applications in robotics, where the…
This paper considers the path planning problem for autonomous exploration of an unknown environment using multiple heterogeneous robots such as drones, wheeled, and legged robots, which have different capabilities to traverse complex…
Solving sparse reward tasks through exploration is one of the major challenges in deep reinforcement learning, especially in three-dimensional, partially-observable environments. Critically, the algorithm proposed in this article uses a…
Multi-robot motion planning problems often have many local minima. It is essential to visualize those local minima such that we can better understand, debug and interact with multi-robot systems. Towards this goal, we present the…
As robotic systems continue to address emerging issues in areas such as logistics, mobility, manufacturing, and disaster response, it is increasingly important to rapidly generate safe and energy-efficient trajectories. In this article, we…
In this paper we present a cooperative multi-robot strategy to adaptively explore and sample environments that are unfavorable for humans. We propose a methodology for a team of heterogeneous robots to collaborate on information based…
In this paper, we propose a path re-planning algorithm that makes robots able to work in scenarios with moving obstacles. The algorithm switches between a set of pre-computed paths to avoid collisions with moving obstacles. It also improves…