Related papers: Volumetric Ergodic Control
This paper presents a whole-body robot control method for exploring and probing a given region of interest. The ergodic control formalism behind such an exploration behavior consists of matching the time-averaged statistics of a robot…
In search and surveillance applications in robotics, it is intuitive to spatially distribute robot trajectories with respect to the probability of locating targets in the domain. Ergodic coverage is one such approach to trajectory planning…
In this article, we present a feedback control method for tactile coverage tasks, such as cleaning or surface inspection. These tasks are challenging to plan due to complex continuous physical interactions. In these tasks, the coverage…
In this work, we address the problem of multi-robot adaptive coverage, where teams of robots perform dynamic sampling by continuously adjusting their positions to collect data in an environment. This task can be challenging, particularly…
Autonomous robotic exploration in remote and extreme environments allows scientists to model complex transport phenomena and collective behaviors described by continuously deforming flow fields. Although these environments are naturally…
This paper presents an active search trajectory synthesis technique for autonomous mobile robots with nonlinear measurements and dynamics. The presented approach uses the ergodicity of a planned trajectory with respect to an expected…
This paper addresses the problem of trajectory planning for information gathering with a dynamic and resolution-varying sensor footprint. Ergodic planning offers a principled framework that balances exploration (visiting all areas) and…
We present a decentralized ergodic control policy for time-varying area coverage problems for multiple agents with nonlinear dynamics. Ergodic control allows us to specify distributions as objectives for area coverage problems for nonlinear…
Although a number of solutions exist for the problems of coverage, search and target localization---commonly addressed separately---whether there exists a unified strategy that addresses these objectives in a coherent manner without being…
This paper addresses the problem of enabling a robot to represent and recreate visual information through physical motion, focusing on drawing using pens, brushes, or other tools. This work uses ergodicity as a control objective that…
Ergodic coverage effectively generates exploratory behaviors for embodied agents by aligning the spatial distribution of the agent's trajectory with a target distribution, where the difference between these two distributions is measured by…
This paper addresses the autonomous robot ergodicity problem for efficient environment exploration. The spatial distribution as a reference is given by a mixture of Gaussian and the mass generation of the robot is assumed to be skinny…
One of the goals of active information acquisition using multi-robot teams is to keep the relative uncertainty in each region at the same level to maintain identical acquisition quality (e.g., consistent target detection) in all the…
We present a novel formulation of ergodic trajectory optimization that can be specified over general domains using kernel maximum mean discrepancy. Ergodic trajectory optimization is an effective approach that generates coverage paths for…
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…
Ergodic Optimization is the process of finding invariant probability measures that maximize the integral of a given function. It has been conjectured that "most" functions are optimized by measures supported on a periodic orbit, and it has…
This paper develops KL-Ergodic Exploration from Equilibrium ($\text{KL-E}^3$), a method for robotic systems to integrate stability into actively generating informative measurements through ergodic exploration. Ergodic exploration enables…
This research addresses the challenge of performing search missions in dynamic environments, particularly for drifting targets whose movement is dictated by a flow field. This is accomplished through a dynamical system that integrates two…
We propose a novel autonomous robotic palpation framework for real-time elastic mapping during tissue exploration using a viscoelastic tissue model. The method combines force-based parameter estimation using a commercial force/torque sensor…
This paper investigates performance guarantees on coverage-based ergodic exploration methods in environments containing disturbances. Ergodic exploration methods generate trajectories for autonomous robots such that time spent in each area…