Related papers: Navigation between initial and desired community s…
Sociability is essential for modern robots to increase their acceptability in human environments. Traditional techniques use manually engineered utility functions inspired by observing pedestrian behaviors to achieve social navigation.…
Assembling optimal microbial communities is key for various applications in biofuel production, agriculture, and human health. Finding the optimal community is challenging because the number of possible communities grows exponentially with…
Learning a policy capable of moving an agent between any two states in the environment is important for many robotics problems involving navigation and manipulation. Due to the sparsity of rewards in such tasks, applying reinforcement…
One of the challenges for future infrastructures is how to design a network with high efficiency and strong connectivity at low cost. We propose self-organized geographical networks beyond the vulnerable scale-free structure found in many…
We present an algorithm for safe robot navigation in complex dynamic environments using a variant of model predictive equilibrium point control. We use an optimization formulation to navigate robots gracefully in dynamic environments by…
Due to the sparse rewards and high degree of environment variation, reinforcement learning approaches such as Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) are plagued by issues of high variance when applied in complex real world environments.…
Navigation is an essential ability for mobile agents to be completely autonomous and able to perform complex actions. However, the problem of navigation for agents with limited (or no) perception of the world, or devoid of a fully defined…
Intelligent physical systems as embodied cognitive systems must perform high-level reasoning while concurrently managing an underlying control architecture. The link between cognition and control must manage the problem of converting…
Integrating mobile robots into human society involves the fundamental problem of navigation in crowds. This problem has been studied by considering the behaviour of humans at the level of individuals, but this representation limits the…
We introduce a model to study the impact of catastrophes on evolutionary paths. If we do not allow catastrophes the number of changes in the maximum fitness of a population grows logarithmically with respect to time. Allowing catastrophes…
In this paper we consider the problem of navigation and motion control in an area densely populated with other agents. We propose an algorithm that, without explicit communication and based on the information it has, computes the best…
Animals moving together in groups are believed to interact among each other with effective social forces, such as attraction, repulsion and alignment. Such forces can be inferred using 'force maps', i.e. by analysing the dependency of the…
Social dilemmas are an integral part of social interactions. Cooperative actions, ranging from secreting extra-cellular products in microbial populations to donating blood in humans, are costly to the actor and hence create an incentive to…
The Transience objective is not to visit any state infinitely often. While this is not possible in finite Markov Decision Process (MDP), it can be satisfied in countably infinite ones, e.g., if the transition graph is acyclic. We prove the…
Robotic guidance systems have shown promise in supporting blind and visually impaired (BVI) individuals with wayfinding and obstacle avoidance. However, most existing systems assume a clear path and do not support a critical aspect of…
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…
Empowering robots to navigate in a socially compliant manner is essential for the acceptance of robots moving in human-inhabited environments. Previously, roboticists have developed geometric navigation systems with decades of empirical…
Choosing the placement of wildlife crossings (i.e., green bridges) to reconnect animal species' fragmented habitats is among the 17 goals towards sustainable development by the UN. We consider the following established model: Given a graph…
Transport networks, such as vasculature or river networks, provide key functions in organisms and the environment. They usually contain loops whose significance for the stability and robustness of the network is well documented. However,…
A fundamental goal of microbial ecology is to understand what determines the diversity, stability, and structure of microbial ecosystems. The microbial context poses special conceptual challenges because of the strong mutual influences…