Flying and Ground Robot Collaboration for Camera-based Search and Rescue

Search and Rescue (SaR) missions present challenges due to the complexity of the disaster scenarios. Most life losses and injuries occur in developing countries. Robotics has become indispensable for rapidly locating disaster victims. Combining flying and ground robots more effectively serves this purpose due to their complementary features. To...

Modelling an Emergency Evacuation: Mathematical modelling of emergency evacuation in the presence of search and rescue robots: A combined game theoretic and BDI-based approach

The impact of disasters on the affected population is catastrophic. Proper disaster management practices are needed to reduce their societal damage. This includes Search and Rescue (SaR) missions, which pertain measures to find potentially trapped victims. This task can be alleviated by the support of a fleet of SaR robots. This fleet is...

Development of a model predictive controller for motion planning in a dynamic urban search and rescue environment

A key challenge for SaR robotics is to avoid dynamic obstacles in cluttered environments, with limited and noisy information. In this research, a controller for SaR robots is developed by coupling a local heuristic motion planner with a model predictive control (MPC) based trajectory tracker. Constraint tightening and tube-based control are used...

Personalized and Adaptive Cognitive Human-Robot Interaction with a Novel Fuzzy Logic Control and Reinforcement Learning-Based Paradigm: Master Thesis Report

An aging population puts a pressure on health-care workers working with dementia patients globally. A potential solution is to provide care with Socially Assistive Robots (SARs), i.e. robots who help people through social interaction. However, for effective care these SARs must be able to personalize their behavior to individual patients and...

Hierarchical Cooperative Mission Planning of Non-Homogeneous Autonomous Search-and-Rescue Robots

The application of autonomous robots in search-and-rescue (SAR) missions forms a challenging field of research. Cooperative search behaviour can greatly increase the efficiency with which a multi-agent system creates situational awareness of and finds victims within an unknown environment. In this research we develop an autonomous mission...

Mathematical Modelling of Theory of Mind: Enabling Socially Assistive Robots to understand and predict humans in long-term interactions

Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) i.e., robots that assist humans through social interactions with them, have shown potential to improve the quality of life of their users. Nonetheless, the state-of-the-art SARs face challenges that prevent them from or limit them in assisting humans in the real world. Although current SARs display cues that...

Adaptive Fuzzy Logic Control Applied to Socially Assistive Drones: A Case Study

With the number of diagnosed cases rising every year, Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is in need of novel therapeutic approaches to counteract the social and motor impairments inflicted by it. In this research, one of such therapeutic approaches, movement therapy (in particular Dance Movement Therapy (DMT)), is combined with the concept of...

Model predictive control approaches for urban traffic networks: A comparison between optimization algorithms

In this thesis, the effect of traffic light control on urban networks is investigated, with the main focus on the optimization algorithms used to solve the optimization problems resulting from a model predictive control approach. This will be done by using a macroscopic traffic flow model (the S-Model) to simulate the real-time traffic flows...

Estimation of missing flow at junctions using control plan and floating car data