Energy-Efficient Routing of a Multirobot Station: A Flexible Time-Space Network Approach

This paper investigates a novel routing problem of a multi-robot station in a manufacturing cell. In the existing literature, the objective is to minimize the cycle time or energy consumption separately. The routing problem considered in this paper aims to reduce the cycle time and energy consumption jointly for each robot while avoiding...

RAST: Risk-Aware Spatio-Temporal Safety Corridors for MAV Navigation in Dynamic Uncertain Environments

Autonomous navigation of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) in dynamic and unknown environments is a complex and challenging task. Current works rely on assumptions to solve the problem. The MAV's pose is precisely known, the dynamic obstacles can be explicitly segmented from static ones, their number is known and fixed, or they can be modeled with...

Continuous Occupancy Mapping in Dynamic Environments Using Particles

Particle-based dynamic occupancy maps were proposed in recent years to model the obstacles in dynamic environments. Current particle-based maps describe the occupancy status in discrete grid form and suffer from the grid size problem, wherein a large grid size is unfavorable for motion planning while a small grid size lowers efficiency and...

Probabilistic Motion Planning for Multi-Robot Systems

Planning safe motions for multi-robot systems is crucial for deploying them in real-world applications such as target tracking, environmental monitoring, and multi-view cinematography. Traditional approaches mainly solve the multi-robot motion planning problem in a deterministic manner, where the robot states and system models are perfectly...

Learning-Based Multi-Robot Formation Control With Obstacle Avoidance

Multi-robot formation control has been intensively studied in recent years. In practical applications, the multi-robot system's ability to independently change the formation to avoid collision among the robots or with obstacles is critical. In this study, a multi-robot adaptive formation control framework based on deep reinforcement learning...

Model-Reference Reinforcement Learning for Collision-Free Tracking Control of Autonomous Surface Vehicles

This paper presents a novel model-reference reinforcement learning algorithm for the intelligent tracking control of uncertain autonomous surface vehicles with collision avoidance. The proposed control algorithm combines a conventional control method with reinforcement learning to enhance control accuracy and intelligence. In the proposed...

Hear-and-avoid for unmanned air vehicles using convolutional neural networks

To investigate how an unmanned air vehicle can detect manned aircraft with a single microphone, an audio data set is created in which unmanned air vehicle ego-sound and recorded aircraft sound are mixed together. A convolutional neural network is used to perform air traffic detection. Due to restrictions on flying unmanned air vehicles close to...

A Time-Space Network Model for Collision-free Routing of Planar Motions in a Multi-Robot Station

This article investigates a new collision-free routing problem of a multirobot system. The objective is to minimize the cycle time of operation tasks for each robot while avoiding collisions. The focus is set on the operation of the end-effector and its connected joint, and the operation is projected onto a circular area on the plane. We...

Routing of a multi-robot system using a Time-Space Network model

In this paper, we study the collision-free routing of a multi-robot system to complete given tasks in the shortest time. In a robotic assembly unit, several stations work serially and in parallel. In a station, multiple robots share the same workspace and face the challenge of minimizing the cycle time and avoiding collisions at the same time...

Cooperative distributed predictive control for collision-free vehicle platoons

The rapidly developing computing and communication technologies improve the autonomy of individual vehicles on the one hand and facilitate the coordination among vehicles on the other. In the context of dynamic speed management, this study considers a platoon of intelligent vehicles that are required to maintain desired inter-vehicle spaces and...

Chance-constrained collision avoidance for MAVs in dynamic environments

Safe autonomous navigation of microair vehicles in cluttered dynamic environments is challenging due to the uncertainties arising from robot localization, sensing, and motion disturbances. This letter presents a probabilistic collision avoidance method for navigation among other robots and moving obstacles, such as humans. The approach...

Cooperative collision avoidance for nonholonomic robots

In this paper, we present a method, namely CCA, for collision avoidance in dynamic environments among interacting agents, such as other robots or humans. Given a preferred motion by a global planner or driver, the method computes a collision-free local motion for a short time horizon, which respects the actuator constraints and allows for...

Safe nonlinear trajectory generation for parallel autonomy with a dynamic vehicle model

High-end vehicles are already equipped with safety systems, such as assistive braking and automatic lane following, enhancing vehicle safety. Yet, these current solutions can only help in low-complexity driving situations. In this paper, we introduce a parallel autonomy, or shared control, framework that computes safe trajectories for an...

Indoor A* Pathfinding through an Octree Representation of a Point Cloud

There is a growing demand of 3D indoor pathfinding applications. Researched in the field of robotics during the last decades of the 20th century, these methods focussed on 2D navigation. Nowadays we would like to have the ability to help people navigate inside buildings or send a drone inside a building when this is too dangerous for people....

Taxonomy of Conflict Detection and Resolution Approaches for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle in an Integrated Airspace

This paper proposes a taxonomy of Conflict Detection and Resolution (CD&R) approaches for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) operation in an integrated airspace. Possible approaches for UAVs are surveyed and broken down based on their types of surveillance, coordination, maneuver, and autonomy. The factors are combined back selectively, with...

Ships in an Artificial Force Field: A Multi-agent System for Nautical Traffic and Safety

The main objective of this research is developing a simulation tool that provides information of detailed ship behavior in a specific navigational environment, on both the ship traffic level and the individual ship level, for safety analysis, decision making, planning of ports and waterways, and design of mitigation measures. In this research,...

Artificial Force Field for Haptic Feedback in UAV Teleoperation

The feedback upon which operators in teleoperation tasks base their control actions differs substantially from the feedback to the driver of a vehicle. On the one hand, there is often a lack of sensory information; on the other hand, there is additional status information presented via the visual channel. Haptic feedback could be used to unload...

The development of a man-machine interface for space manipulator displacement