Distributed multi-target tracking and active perception with mobile camera networks

Smart cameras are an essential component in surveillance and monitoring applications, and they have been typically deployed in networks of fixed camera locations. The addition of mobile cameras, mounted on robots, can overcome some of the limitations of static networks such as blind spots or back-lightning, allowing the system to gather the...

Active Classification of Moving Targets With Learned Control Policies

In this paper, we consider the problem where a drone has to collect semantic information to classify multiple moving targets. In particular, we address the challenge of computing control inputs that move the drone to informative viewpoints, position and orientation, when the information is extracted using a “black-box” classifier, e.g., a deep...

A Framework for Fast Prototyping of Photo-realistic Environments with Multiple Pedestrians

Robotic applications involving people often require advanced perception systems to better understand complex real-world scenarios. To address this challenge, photo-realistic and physics simulators are gaining popularity as a means of generating accurate data labeling and designing scenarios for evaluating generalization capabilities, e.g.,...

Learning scalable and efficient communication policies for multi-robot collision avoidance

Decentralized multi-robot systems typically perform coordinated motion planning by constantly broadcasting their intentions to avoid collisions. However, the risk of collision between robots varies as they move and communication may not always be needed. This paper presents an efficient communication method that addresses the problem of “when...

Where to Look Next: Learning Viewpoint Recommendations for Informative Trajectory Planning

Search missions require motion planning and navigation methods for information gathering that continuously replan based on new observations of the robot's surroundings. Current methods for information gathering, such as Monte Carlo Tree Search, are capable of reasoning over long horizons, but they are computationally expensive. An alternative...

With whom to communicate: Learning efficient communication for multi-robot collision avoidance

Decentralized multi-robot systems typically perform coordinated motion planning by constantly broadcasting their intentions as a means to cope with the lack of a central system coordinating the efforts of all robots. Especially in complex dynamic environments, the coordination boost allowed by communication is critical to avoid collisions...