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Using multiple mobile robots in search missions offers a lot of benefits, but one needs a suitable and competent motion control algorithm which is able to consider sensors characteristics, the uncertainty of target detection and complexity…
In the field of modern robotics, robots are proving to be useful in tackling high-risk situations, such as navigating hazardous environments like burning buildings, earthquake-stricken areas, or patrolling crime-ridden streets, as well as…
In this paper, we propose a new framework for multi-agent collaborative exploration of unknown environments. The proposed method combines state-of-the-art algorithms in mapping, safe corridor generation and multi-agent planning. It first…
Search-and-rescue (SaR) in unknown environments requires precise, optimal, and fast decisions. Robots are promising candidates for autonomously performing SaR tasks in unknown environments. While humans use their heuristics to effectively…
The use of skills (a.k.a., options) can greatly accelerate exploration in reinforcement learning, especially when only sparse reward signals are available. While option discovery methods have been proposed for individual agents, in…
The goal of coordinated multi-robot exploration tasks is to employ a team of autonomous robots to explore an unknown environment as quickly as possible. Compared with human-designed methods, which began with heuristic and rule-based…
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…
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…
Multi-agent exploration of a bounded 3D environment with unknown initial positions of agents is a challenging problem. It requires quickly exploring the environments as well as robustly merging the sub-maps built by the agents. We take the…
Autonomous robots collaboratively exploring an unknown environment is still an open problem. The problem has its roots in coordination among non-stationary agents, each with only a partial view of information. The problem is compounded when…
We propose a novel complete algorithm for multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) called lazy constraints addition search for MAPF (LaCAM). MAPF is a problem of finding collision-free paths for multiple agents on graphs and is the foundation of…
We consider the problem of cooperative exploration where multiple robots need to cooperatively explore an unknown region as fast as possible. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has recently become a trending paradigm for solving this…
Utilizing robots for autonomous target search in complex and unknown environments can greatly improve the efficiency of search and rescue missions. However, existing methods have shown inadequate performance due to hardware platform…
Today's scientific challenges, from climate modeling to Inertial Confinement Fusion design to novel material design, require exploring huge design spaces. In order to enable high-impact scientific discovery, we need to scale up our ability…
In large unknown environments, search operations can be much more time-efficient with the use of multi-robot fleets by parallelizing efforts. This means robots must efficiently perform collaborative mapping (exploration) while…
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…
This paper presents an algorithm for multiobjective optimization that blends together a number of heuristics. A population of agents combines heuristics that aim at exploring the search space both globally and in a neighborhood of each…
We consider several algorithms for exploring and filling an unknown, connected region, by simple, airborne agents. The agents are assumed to be identical, autonomous, anonymous and to have a finite amount of memory. The region is modeled as…
Many robotic applications, such as search-and-rescue, require multiple agents to search for and perform actions on targets. However, such missions present several challenges, including cooperative exploration, task selection and allocation,…
Multi-agent path finding in continuous space and time with geometric agents MAPF$^\mathcal{R}$ is addressed in this paper. The task is to navigate agents that move smoothly between predefined positions to their individual goals so that they…