Related papers: MUI-TARE: Multi-Agent Cooperative Exploration with…
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) in large-scale, unknown, and complex subterranean environments is a challenging problem. Sensors must operate in off-nominal conditions; uneven and slippery terrains make wheel odometry…
The goal of Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is to find a set of paths for a fleet of agents moving in a shared environment such that the agents reach their goals without colliding with each other. In practice, some of the robots executing…
Fast and accurate path planning is important for ground robots to achieve safe and efficient autonomous navigation in unstructured outdoor environments. However, most existing methods exploiting either 2D or 2.5D maps struggle to balance…
Heterogeneous teams of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can enhance the exploration capabilities of aerial robots by exploiting different strengths and abilities of varying UAVs. This paper presents a novel method for exploring unknown…
Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) requires collision-free trajectories for multiple agents on a shared graph, often with the objective of minimizing the sum-of-costs (SOC). Many optimal and bounded-suboptimal solvers rely on time-expanded…
Maze-like environments, such as cave and pipe networks, pose unique challenges for multiple robots to coordinate, including communication constraints and congestion. To address these challenges, we propose a distributed multi-agent maze…
While evolutionary computation is well suited for automatic discovery in engineering, it can also be used to gain insight into how humans and organizations could perform more effectively. Using a real-world problem of innovation search in…
Avoiding collisions is one of the vital tasks for systems of autonomous mobile agents. We focus on the problem of finding continuous coordinated paths for multiple mobile disc agents in a 2-d environment with polygonal obstacles. The…
Among sub-optimal Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) solvers, rule-based algorithms are particularly appealing since they are complete. Even in crowded scenarios, they allow finding a feasible solution that brings each agent to its target,…
This paper presents a novel strategy for autonomous teamed exploration of subterranean environments using legged and aerial robots. Tailored to the fact that subterranean settings, such as cave networks and underground mines, often involve…
Efficient exploration is a well known problem in deep reinforcement learning and this problem is exacerbated in multi-agent reinforcement learning due the intrinsic complexities of such algorithms. There are several approaches to…
Object rearrangement in a multi-room setup should produce a reasonable plan that reduces the agent's overall travel and the number of steps. Recent state-of-the-art methods fail to produce such plans because they rely on explicit…
LiDAR-based place recognition serves as a crucial enabler for long-term autonomy in robotics and autonomous driving systems. Yet, prevailing methodologies relying on handcrafted feature extraction face dual challenges: (1) Inconsistent…
Intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning aims to address the exploration challenge for sparse-reward tasks. However, the study of exploration methods in transition-dependent multi-agent settings is largely absent from the literature.…
We consider a team of reinforcement learning agents that concurrently learn to operate in a common environment. We identify three properties - adaptivity, commitment, and diversity - which are necessary for efficient coordinated exploration…
Multi-agent path finding (MAPF) is an essential component of many large-scale, real-world robot deployments, from aerial swarms to warehouse automation. However, despite the community's continued efforts, most state-of-the-art MAPF planners…
The application of Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (Multi-UAV) in Wilderness Search and Rescue (WiSAR) significantly enhances mission success due to their rapid coverage of search areas from high altitudes and their adaptability to…
The success of re-localisation has crucial implications for the practical deployment of robots operating within a prior map or relative to one another in real-world scenarios. Using single-modality, place recognition and localisation can be…
This letter presents a complete framework Meeting-Merging-Mission for multi-robot exploration under communication restriction. Considering communication is limited in both bandwidth and range in the real world, we propose a lightweight…
Episodic rewards present a significant challenge in reinforcement learning. While intrinsic reward methods have demonstrated effectiveness in single-agent rein-forcement learning scenarios, their application to multi-agent reinforcement…