22 accepted papers
We explore a navigation planning problem under uncertainty for a simple robot with extremely limited sensing. Our robot can turn subject to significant proportional error and move forward. As it moves in an environment with a known terrain map, the robot can detect changes in the terrain at its curr
There is now a large body of techniques, many based on formal methods, for describing and realizing complex robotics tasks, including those involving a variety of rich goals and time-extended behavior. This paper explores the limits of what sorts of tasks are specifiable, examining how the precise g
This paper introduces and solves a visibility-based escort planning problem. This novel problem, which is closely related to the well-researched family of visibility-based pursuit-evasion problems in robotics, entails an escort agent tasked with escorting a vulnerable agent, called the VIP, in a 2-d…
Robotic systems have subsystems with a combinatorially large configuration space and hundreds or thousands of possible software and hardware configuration options interacting non-trivially. The configurable parameters are set to target specific objectives, but they can cause functional faults when i
Reconfigurable modular robots can dynamically assemble/disassemble to accomplish the desired task better. Magnetic modular cubes are scalable modular subunits with embedded permanent magnets in a 3D-printed cubic body and can be wirelessly controlled by an external, uniform, time-varying magnetic fi
We consider a robot that answers questions about its environment by traveling to appropriate places and then sensing. Questions are posed as structured queries and may involve conditional or contingent relationships between observable properties. After formulating this problem, and empha-sizing the…
Practical robot designs must strike a compromise between fabrication/manufacture cost and anticipated execution performance. Compared to parsimonious designs, more capable (and hence more expensive) robots generally achieve their ends with greater efficiency. This paper examines how the roboticist m…
This paper presents a novel algorithm for monitoring marine environments utilizing a resource-constrained robot. Collecting water quality data from large bodies of water is paramount for monitoring the ecosystem's health, particularly for predicting harmful cyanobacteria blooms. The large spatial di…
This paper studies a multi-robot visibility-based pursuit-evasion problem in which a group of pursuer robots are tasked with detecting an evader within a two dimensional polygonal environment. The primary contribution is a novel formulation of the pursuit-evasion problem that modifies the pursuers'…
Motivated by the need for tools to aid in the design of effective robots, we examine how to determine the role that particular sensing and actuator resources play in enabling a robot to achieve useful ends. Rather than merely asking “will this sensor suffice?” we classify general modifications to th…
We consider the problem of coverage planning for a particular type of very simple mobile robot. The robot must be able to translate in a commanded direction (specified in a global reference frame), with bounded error on the motion direction, until reaching the environment boundary. The objective, fo…
In large scale coverage operations, such as marine exploration or aerial monitoring, single robot approaches are not ideal, as they may take too long to cover a large area. In such scenarios, multi-robot approaches are preferable. Furthermore, several real world vehicles are non-holonomic, but can b…
Combinatorial filters are discrete structures for modeling and reasoning about robotic systems. Such filters are of interest not only because of the potential for reduction of the computational power needed to execute the filter, but also for the insight they can sometimes provide into the informati…
We wish to minimize the information that a robot maintains to carry out its task. Filters are one way to keep stored state consistent with sensed values, though they may also capture some information about the structure of the world that the robot inhabits. This paper builds on prior work on (improp…
We consider a visibility-based pursuit-evasion problem in which a single robot with an omnidirectional but unreliable sensor moving through an environment must systematically search that environment to detect an unpredictably moving target. A common assumption in visibility-based pursuit-evasion is…
This paper addresses the problem of generating coverage paths-that is, paths that pass within some sensor footprint of every point in an environment-for vehicles with Dubins motion constraints. We extend previous work that solves this coverage problem as a traveling salesman problem (TSP) by introdu…
This paper addresses the problem of robot global localization in a known environment, in the presence of many dynamic obstacles. Deploying a robot in crowded spaces such as museums, shopping malls, department stores, or university campuses is especially challenging because the moving people occlude…
We describe a new decentralized algorithm for multi-robot systems to form arbitrary repeated lattice patterns. Prior work showed how to represent a desired pattern using a directed graph in which each edge is labeled with a rigid body transformation, and proposed an algorithm that accepts this graph…
We introduce a complete algorithm for solving a pursuit-evasion problem in a simply-connected two-dimensional environment, for the case of a single pursuer equipped with fixed beam sensors. The input for our algorithm is an environment and a collection of sensor directions, in which each is capable
For a given robot and a given task, this paper addresses questions about which modifications may be made to the robotâs suite of sensors without impacting the robotâs behavior in completing its task. Though this is an important design-time question, few principled methods exist for providing a d…
We present an algorithm that uses a sparse collection of noisy sensors to characterize the observed behavior of a mobile agent. Our approach models the agent's behavior using a collection of randomized simulators called implicit agent models and seeks to classify the agent according to which of thes…
We address the problem of deciding what information a robot should transmit to the outside world, by exploring a setting where some information (e.g., current status of the task) must be shared in order for the robot to be useful, but where, simultaneously, we wish to impose limits which ensure cert…