15 accepted papers
Recently, centralized receding horizon online multi-robot coverage path planning algorithms have shown remarkable scalability in thoroughly exploring large, complex, unknown workspaces with many robots. In a horizon, the path planning and the path execution interleave, meaning when the path planning
We present an online centralized path planning algorithm to cover a large, complex, unknown workspace with multiple homogeneous mobile robots. Our algorithm is horizon-based, synchronous, and on-demand. The recently proposed horizon-based synchronous algorithms compute all the robots’ paths in each…
We study a variant of the multi-robot goal assignment problem where a unique goal to each robot needs to be assigned while minimizing the largest cost of movement among the robots, called makespan. A significant step in solving this problem is to find the cost associated with the robot-goal pairs, w…
Optimal placement of charging stations in a workspace is a crucial problem to address, for efficient operation of battery-driven mobile robots. When the battery charge of a robot reaches a certain threshold, the robot must be able to reach a nearby charging station to recharge its battery. In this p…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has the potential to be used for synthesizing feedback controllers (agents) for various complex systems with unknown dynamics. These systems are expected to satisfy diverse safety and liveness properties best captured using temporal logic. In RL, the reward function…
We address the path planning problem for a team of robots satisfying a complex high-level mission specification given in the form of a Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formula. The state-of-the-art approach to this problem employs the automata-theoretic model checking technique to solve this problem. Thi…
Online coverage path planning to explore an unknown workspace with multiple homogeneous robots could be either centralized or distributed. While distributed planners are computationally faster, centralized planners can produce more efficient paths, reducing the duration of completing a coverage miss…
We present a method to find the optimal control strategy for a robot using prior information of localization that maximizes the probability of satisfaction of a temporal logic specification while considering the uncertainty in both motion and sensing, two major causes for localization uncertainty. T…
Path planning for a robot is one of the major problems in the area of robotics. When a robot is given a task in the form of a Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) specification such that the task needs to be carried out repetitively, we want the robot to follow the shortest cyclic path so that the number of…
In many multi-robot applications, mobile worker robots are often engaged in performing some tasks repetitively by following pre-computed trajectories. As these robots are battery-powered, they need to get recharged at regular intervals. We envision that, in the future, a few mobile recharger robots…
Efficient recharging is an essential requirement for autonomous mobile robots. In an indoor robotic application, charging stations can be installed offline. However, frequent trips to the charging stations cause inefficiency in the performance of the mobile robots. In an outdoor environment, a charg…
The fundamental path planning problem for a mobile robot involves generating a trajectory for point-to-point navigation while avoiding obstacles. Heuristic-based search algorithms like A* have been shown to be efficient in solving such planning problems. Recently, there has been an increased interes…
Synthesis of a feedback controller for nonlinear dynamical systems like a quadrotor requires to deal with the trade-off between performance and online computation requirement of the controller. Model predictive controllers (MPC) provide excellent control performance, but at the cost of high online c…
This paper presents a methodology for synthesizing a motion plan for a mobile robot to ensure that the robot never gets depleted with battery charge while carrying out its mission successfully. The specification of the robot is provided in the form of an LTL (Linear Temporal Logic) formula. A trajec…
For an autonomous mobile robot, when the available power goes below a certain threshold, the robot needs to abort its current task and move towards a charging station to recharge its battery. The efficiency of an autonomous mobile robot depends significantly on the location of the charging stations.…