13 accepted papers
Effective energy management is essential for maximizing information gathering tasks with networked mobile robots, particularly for large-scale, energy-intensive tasks such as agricultural monitoring and wildfire mapping. This paper presents a novel framework that integrates robots’ energy profiles w…
Gas distribution mapping (GDM) refers to the task of mapping the gas concentrations of an airborne chemical over a region of interest. A mobile robot equipped with a gas sensor can be used potentially autonomously to build such a distribution map. However, modern-day robots might not have enough bat
In a gas distribution mapping (GDM) task, the objective of a mobile robot is to map the gas concentrations of an airborne chemical over a region of interest using onboard sensing. Given the limited battery budget available to the robot, covering the entire area to measure gas concentrations at every…
An exoplanet is a planet, which is not a part of our solar system. Whether life exists in one or more of these exoplanets has fascinated humans for centuries. NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has discovered more than 70% of known exoplanets in our universe. However, manually determining whether a Keple…
Multi-robot teams are becoming an increasingly popular approach for information gathering in large geographic areas, with applications in precision agriculture, surveying the aftermath of natural disasters or tracking pollution. These robot teams are often assembled from untrusted devices not owned…
To achieve coordination in a multi-robot system, the robots typically resort to some form of communication among each other. In most of the multi-robot coordination frameworks, high-level coordination strategies are studied but `how' the ground-level communication takes place, is assumed to be taken…
Communication is one of the most popular and efficient means of multi-robot coordination. Due to potential real-world constraints, such as limited bandwidth and contested scenarios, a communication strategy requiring to send, for example, all n bits of an environment representation might not be feas…
We consider the problem of covering a planar environment, possibly containing unknown obstacles, using a robot of square size D x D attached to a fixed point S by a cable of finite length L. The environment is discretized into 4-connected grid cells with resolution proportional to the robot size. St…
We consider the problem of information collection from a polygonal environment using a multi-robot system, subject to continuous connectivity constraints. In particular, the robots, having a common radius of communication range, must remain connected throughout the exploration maximizing the informa…
In this paper, we study the NP-Hard problem of multi-robot coalition formation for task allocation. To tackle this notoriously difficult problem, we model it as a variant of classical bipartite matching, which we call One-To-Many Bipartite Matching (OTMaM). Unlike the classical bipartite matching te…
Modular self-reconfigurable robots (MSRs) are mostly used in environments where it is difficult to navigate and explore otherwise. Especially, the shape-changing ability of MSRs makes them more dexterous in these situations compared to fixed-body robots. But when the MSR forms a new configuration, u…
We propose a coordination mechanism to avoid inter-robot collisions when the robots' paths overlap with each other. Our proposed coordination technique uses a weighted bipartite matching-based formulation to solve this problem. Initially, each robot is given a unique goal location. But the robots do…
We consider the configuration formation problem in modular robotic systems where a set of singleton modules that are spatially distributed in an environment are required to assume appropriate positions so that they can configure into a new, user-specified target configuration, while simultaneously m