Autonomous assembly of digital materials: with inchworm locomotion robotic assemblers

Throughout history, human progress has been defined by the mastery of materials, transitioning from stone and bronze to the steel age. However, this progression has not only been defined by the materials utilized but has also encompassed a shift in processes, moving from the industrial to the information era. Despite the advances in fabrication...

Path planning for Lunar rovers: A lunar surface path finding and obstacle avoidance algorithm

The unique six-legged swarming rover Lunar Zebro is designed and produced by students from the Delft University of Technology. The objective of the rover is to accomplish an autonomous mission on the Lunar surface by 2024. This thesis evaluates a path planning algorithm that is designed for autonomous navigation in the Lunar environment. The...

Multi-Agent Pickup and Delivery Problems in Uncertain Environments: Automation of hospital workplaces using autonomous transportation robots

The aging of society, population growth and chronic under-investments in education of healthcare workers have all led to a major imbalance between the demand for healthcare and the supply of healthcare. Autonomous robots can be used to relieve overqualified healthcare workers of their repetitive transportation tasks, allowing them to spend more...

Automated Guide-Path Map Generation for Automated Guided Vehicle Systems: An Algorithmic Framework

The design of a guide-path map is a well-known problem in various industries, such as automated guided vehicle (AGV) systems, road networks, and train track design. Nowadays, designing a path map is a manual, time-consuming, and expensive process. The solutions often turn out to be far from optimal. Several approaches are known to generate path...

Multi-agent Planning and Coordination for Automated Aircraft Ground Handling

Inspired by the vision of fully autonomous airside operations at Schiphol airport, this study aims to contribute to the short-term goal of automated aircraft ground handling. In this research, we design and evaluate a multi-agent system for planning of automated ground handling. There are two main components in the system, task allocation...

A Delay Analysis in Airport Engine-off Towing Operations Using Hierarchical Multi-Agent Path Planning

The increased pressure to reduce aircraft emissions and the growing demand for air travel causes airports to consider alternatives for fuel-inefficient aircraft taxiing. External towing tugs can be deployed to effectively reduce on-ground fuel burn of outbound aircraft. These new operations are likely to aggravate ground delays as a result of...

Multi-Agent Pickup-and-Delivery in a Distributed Baggage Handling System

Baggage handling systems in airports are generally over-designed and only need to work at full capacity for a couple of months during their lifetime. To cope with varying demand, flexible baggage handling systems are being developed which use Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) to handle a required capacity. These AGVs transport bags throughout the...

Agent-Based Modelling and Analysis of Non-Autonomous Airport Ground Surface Operations

The highly fuel-inefficient aircraft taxi-phase causes the industry to consider alternative ground propulsion systems. External systems like the Taxibot are preferred over onboard systems as they do not require aircraft structural additions and recertifications. However, the operational implementation of external taxi-systems is expected to...

A Computational Method to Generate One-story Floor Plans for Nursing Homes Based on Daylight Hour Potential and Shortest Path of Circulations

Design of elderly care buildings like nursing homes usually looks for balances between the livability for residents and the circulation efficiency for staffs and workers. Losing the balance between these two has the potential of either dissatisfying residents, uncomfortable living experiences, or causing low efficiency in operations, which might...

Planning and Control of Multiple Mobile Robots for Intralogistics: an optimization-based reordering strategy

In this thesis we consider multiple Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) navigating a common workspace to fulfill intralogistics tasks, typically formulated as the Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) problem. To keep plan execution deadlock-free, one approach is to construct an Action Dependency Graph (ADG) which encodes the ordering of AGVs as they...

Extending CBS to efficiently solve MAPFW

Multi-Agent Path Finding with Way-points (MAPFW) is the problem of routing agents through a graph past a set of waypoint to a goal location, without agents colliding, with the shortest combined path length. This problem has to the authors knowledge not been investigated yet even though it has implications in train scheduling problems and video...

Extending A* to solve multi-agent pathfinding problems with waypoints

In the field of cooperative multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) the optimal set of non-conflicting paths must be found for a set of agents in a graph. The addition of waypoints to this problem (MAPFW) gives rise to the possibility of more complex applications, such as in vehicle routing, aviation, computer games or robotics. Yet no algorithms have...

A Guide to Solving Pathfinding Problems with Multiple Agents

Currently, literature regarding Multiagent Path Finding (MAPF) does not give a broad enough overview of all the different approaches. Many papers are hard to read and require proper knowledge of MAPF. The goal of this report is to give a global overview of MAPF. To achieve this goal, we provide a detailed explanation of what MAPF problems look...

Agent-Based Distributed Planning and Coordination for Resilient Airport Surface Movement Operations

Airport surface movement operations are complex systems that experience many types of adverse events which require resilient, safe and efficient responses. One regularly occurring adverse event is that of runway reconfigurations. Agent based distributed planning and coordination has shown promising results in controlling and maintaining...

The effect of A* pathfinding characteristics on the path length and performance in an octree representation of an indoor point cloud

This thesis presents a new workflow for path finding through an octree representation of an indoor point cloud. I applied the following steps: 1) the point cloud is processed so it fits best in an octree; 2) during the octree generation the interior empty nodes are identified and further processed; 3) for each interior empty node the distance to...

Efficient obstacle avoidance using autonomously generated navigation meshes

With the increasing demand for ever more depth and detail of modern video games, developers are faced with the problem of how to create and manage large amounts of content. One aspect of this is how to cheaply enable game entities to travel through their virtual worlds in a natural and realistic fashion. Game map sizes and complexity have...