Related papers: On the Ergodicity of an Autonomous Robot for Effic…
For a multi-robot system equipped with heterogeneous capabilities, this paper presents a mechanism to allocate robots to tasks in a resilient manner when anomalous environmental conditions such as weather events or adversarial attacks…
This paper presents an algorithm for a team of mobile robots to simultaneously learn a spatial field over a domain and spatially distribute themselves to optimally cover it. Drawing from previous approaches that estimate the spatial field…
Assume that a target is known to be present at an unknown point among a finite set of locations in the plane. We search for it using a mobile robot that has imperfect sensing capabilities. It takes time for the robot to move between…
Evolutionary robotics has aimed to optimize robot control and morphology to produce better and more robust robots. Most previous research only addresses optimization of control, and does this only in simulation. We have developed a…
Robots and intelligent systems that sense or interact with the world are increasingly being used to automate a wide array of tasks. The ability of these systems to complete these tasks depends on a large range of technologies such as the…
We study the algorithmic problem of optimally covering a tree with $k$ mobile robots. The tree is known to all robots, and our goal is to assign a walk to each robot in such a way that the union of these walks covers the whole tree. We…
Our goal is to enable robots to \emph{time} their motion in a way that is purposefully expressive of their internal states, making them more transparent to people. We start by investigating what types of states motion timing is capable of…
Computing collision-free trajectories is of prime importance for safe navigation. We present an approach for computing the collision probability under Gaussian distributed motion and sensing uncertainty with the robot and static obstacle…
Mobile robots require basic information to navigate through an environment: they need to know where they are (localization) and they need to know where they are going. For the latter, robots need a map of the environment. Using sensors of a…
Robots in the real world should be able to adapt to unforeseen circumstances. Particularly in the context of tool use, robots may not have access to the tools they need for completing a task. In this paper, we focus on the problem of tool…
Robotic automation is a key technology that increases the efficiency and flexibility of manufacturing processes. However, one of the challenges in deploying robots in novel environments is finding the optimal base pose for the robot, which…
Robots have the potential to perform search for a variety of applications under different scenarios. Our work is motivated by humanitarian assistant and disaster relief (HADR) where often it is critical to find signs of life in the presence…
For autonomous mobile robots, uncertainties in the environment and system model can lead to failure in the motion planning pipeline, resulting in potential collisions. In order to achieve a high level of robust autonomy, these robots should…
Robot swarms offer significant potential for inspecting diverse infrastructure, ranging from bridges to space stations. However, effective inspection requires accurate robot localization, which demands substantial computational resources…
We present an application of hierarchical Bayesian estimation to robot map building. The revisiting problem occurs when a robot has to decide whether it is seeing a previously-built portion of a map, or is exploring new territory. This is a…
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…
In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a robust motion formation distributed control algorithm for a team of mobile robots. The primary task for the team is to form a geometric shape, which can be freely translated and…
In this paper, we address the problem of safe trajectory planning for autonomous search and exploration in constrained, cluttered environments. Guaranteeing safe (collision-free) trajectories is a challenging problem that has garnered…
This paper presents a coordination algorithm for mobile autonomous robots. Relying upon distributed sensing the robots achieve rendezvous, that is, they move to a common location. Each robot is a point mass moving in a nonconvex environment…
In this paper, we use simulated swarms of robots to further explore the aggregation dynamics generated by these simple individual mechanisms. Our objective is to study the introduction of "informed robots", and to study how many of these…