Multi-robot caravanning

Abstract

Abstract-We study multi-robot caravanning, which is loosely defined as the problem of a heterogeneous team of robots visiting specific areas of an environment (waypoints) as a group. After formally defining this problem, we propose a novel solution that requires minimal communication and scales with the number of waypoints and robots. Our approach restricts explicit communication and coordination to occur only when robots reach waypoints, and relies on implicit coordination when moving between a given pair of waypoints. At the heart of our algorithm is the use of leader election to efficiently exploit the unique environmental knowledge available to each robot in order to plan paths for the group, which makes it general enough to work with robots that have heterogeneous representations of the environment.We implement our approach both in simulation and on a physical platform, and characterize the performance of the approach under various scenarios. We demonstrate that our approach can successfully be used to combine the planning capabilities of different agents.

Communication Among Heterogeneous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): Classification, Trends, and Analysis

“…Libraries such as ArUco and Open CV have also been used in some studies for implementation. The ArUco marker detection library was used in a previous study [82] for visual markers in robot localization and detection. An open CV library was utilized…”

“…The analysis shows that the information mostly communicated among UAVs was either position or location because each UAV required position and location information of other UAVs to ensure coordination among themselves. The position represents the UAV's state and grid position, whereas location information is usually about map [61], area of interest [27], and global environmental information [82]. Orientation information [22] has also been found in various studies over different years.…”

“…The scalability of communication networks established by heterogeneous UAV teams is critical. Scaling up the number of UAVs [61] or increasing UAV teams [82] ondemand to explore larger-scale dynamic environments is becoming a need with an increase in UAV teams in mission-critical activities. This requires dedicated research studies that can consider various cases of real-time-critical situations such as emergencies, disasters, and surveillance.…”

Origami-inspired active structures: a synthesis and review

“…One issue not addressed in the studies and developments mentioned up to this point is that of fold planning, which assesses the physical feasibility of folding operations in complex forms. Amato and coworkers investigated motion planning algorithms [221,222,236,237] that are applicable to the fold planning problem. Their motion planning algorithm can obtain, as input, the geometry of the sheet in both its folded and unfolded shapes and can generate a continuous path through the state space that will allow the sheet to move from one configuration to the other without self-intersecting itself.…”

Research of the Algorithms of Individual and Group Movement Strategies of Autonomous Mobile Robots on a Dynamic Map

“…Примерами группового движения робо-тов является автоматизированное движение при наличии человека оператора, задаю-щего целевую точку в реальном масштабе времени, оптимальное движение до кото-рой рассчитывает группа [1], алгоритмы, ориентированные на поддержание строгой иерархии подчинения роботов [2] или под-держание строя при движении в группе [3][4][5][6]. Эти алгоритмы ориентированы на заранее сформированную группу, уделяют внимание поддержанию формы строя и рассматривают задачу смены лидера, обе-спечивая функционирование группы на тактическом уровне.…”