Figure 4 - uploaded by Giovanni Bianco
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Swarming: robots in one team repel robots of another team with v33; v31 is used for attraction/repulsion; v32 for alignment.
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This paper presents a novel approach to the detection of anti-personnel landmines that uses teams of cooperating robots. Following hints that originate both from classical robotics and from biology, we aim to defining a set of search strategies suitable for being used in an obstacle-cluttered, two-dimensional space. The paper presents the guideline...
Citations
... 4 Since the 1990s, researchers have been leveraging natural swarm behaviors and intelligence for developing swarms in robotics, where groups of robots coordinate and cooperatively perform tasks. 5,6 In the 1990s, the development of algorithms had already begun for robotic swarms, including pattern generation, 7 navigation, 8,9 and materials design. 10,11 In the early 2000s, various types of macroscale (>10 −1 m) modular robotic systems and robotic swarms consisting of a few robots (e.g., Kheperas, 12 sbots, 13−15 and Jasmines 16 ) began to appear, and the macroscale robotic swarm was systematically reviewed. ...
Swarms, which stem from collective behaviors among individual elements, are commonly seen in nature. Since two decades ago, scientists have been attempting to understand the principles of natural swarms and leverage them for creating artificial swarms. To date, the underlying physics; techniques for actuation, navigation, and control; field-generation systems; and a research community are now in place. This Review reviews the fundamental principles and applications of micro/nanorobotic swarms. The generation mechanisms of the emergent collective behaviors among the micro/nanoagents identified over the past two decades are elucidated. The advantages and drawbacks of different techniques, existing control systems, major challenges, and potential prospects of micro/nanorobotic swarms are discussed.
... The goal of the research behind Formation Building Algorithms is to reduce the risk of hazardous tasks currently done by humans [6] [7]. In [1], particularly, the implementation of consensus variables, updates the position, linear velocity, and angular velocity with the information available from the adjacent robots or by the data transmitted from a robot neighbor at a time instant. ...
... Current technology suggests that robots could be used instead of humans to perform the demining task as minefields are dangerous to humans; thus a robotic solution allows human operators to be physically removed from the haz-ardous area (Cassinis et al. 1999;Kumar and Sahin 2003). In this work, we focus more on the coordination of the robots to accomplish the mission than the issue of disarming physically the mines. ...
The mine detection in an unexplored area is an optimization problem where multiple mines, randomly distributed throughout an area, need to be discovered and disarmed in a minimum amount of time. We propose a strategy to explore an unknown area, using a stigmergy approach based on ants behavior, and a novel swarm-based protocol to recruit and coordinate robots for disarming the mines cooperatively. Simulation tests are presented to show the effectiveness of our proposed ant-based task robot coordination with only the exploration task and with both exploration and recruiting strategies. Multiple minimization objectives have been considered: the robots’ recruiting time and the overall area exploration time. We discuss, through simulation, different cases under different network and field conditions, performed by the robots. The results have shown that the proposed decentralized approaches enable the swarm of robots to perform cooperative tasks intelligently without any central control.
... To prevent the number of casualties due to manual mine clearance, mobile robots can be used for detection and mapping of the minefield region. Recent approaches for the use of mobile robots in landmine detection include a swarm of lightweight robots which is light enough not to make the mine explode [6][7][8][9], larger and heavier robots (i.e., Mine Breaker 2000) [10], and legged robots [11][12][13]. ...
Demining or mine clearing is the process of detecting and removing land mine from an area. Uncleared landmines represent a major humanitarian and economic threat in over 70 countries. Its victims suffer from permanent disability if not killed and require horrific expensive care. Also, the cost of the land, roads, and underground resources that remains useless. Clearing mines is very dangerous work. The majority of demining work is still carried out manually using metal detectors and prodders. For every 5,000 mines that are removed, one person is killed and two people are injured. Over the years there has been considerable interest within the scientific and engineering communities in the application of advanced technologies to improve the safety and efficiency of this work. In this paper a motion-planning algorithm to enable landmine detection and clearing robots to systematically scan a minefield, detect landmines and clear it is presented. The algorithm works on two steps; (1) generate the driving tracks that can be used to scan the minefield area, and (2) connect these tracks using Dubins’ path in order to generate a continues and complete trajectory which can be used for the robot’s navigation. The inputs to the algorithm are the coordinates of the outer boundaries of the minefield’s vertices, the operating width of the robot, the minimum turning radius of the robot/autonomous vehicle, the required (or optimized) driving angle in the field, and the robot’s entrance point to the minefield. The output is a trajectory that consists of the coordinates of a number of headland paths connected using Dubins’ curves and a set of parallel tracks covering the entire minefield area connected using Dubins’ curves. The resultant trajectory enables the robot to scan the minefield area in the shortest time in a way that prevents missing any landmine by scanning the entire field area. It also enables the robot to work fully autonomous with minimal or without human intervention at all and therefore it dramatically reduces risks of workplace injury and maximize operation efficiency.
... The mobile robotic sensors 1 with different coverage types have got practical applications: surveillance of an area, reconnaissance, maintenance job, inspection in hazardous areas, mine deployment, mine sweeping, surveillance, sentry duty, maintenance inspection, ship hull cleaning, communications relaying [22], boarder patrolling [6], environmental studies, detecting and localizing the origin of hazardous chemicals leakage or vapour emission, finding sources of pollutants and plumes, environmental monitoring of disposal sites on the deep ocean floor [23], sea floor surveying for hydrocarbon exploration [24], ballistic missile tracking, bush fire monitoring, oil spill detection at high seas, environmental extremum seeking [25,26,27], environmental filed level tracking [28], target capturing [29] and many others. A good example of hazardous areas coverage is mine sweeping, which is an extremely challenging and dangerous task [22,30,31]. ...
... sweep coverage and to also sweep smoothly across an arbitrary boundary (as shown in 3.2). In Chapter 2, we can remember that the sweep coverage has potential applications for minesweepers [31,30], patrolling borders [6], environment monitoring of the deep ocean floor [23] and underwater oil exploration [24]. While centralized systems can also be used to accomplish the aforementioned tasks, there is high complexity associated with each mobile robot's communication with a central system. ...
This research investigates decentralized control of mobile robots specifically for coverage problems. There are different approaches associated with decentralized control strategy for coverage control problems. We perform a comparative review of these approaches and use the approach based on simple local coordination rules. We investigate this extensively used nearest neighbour rule based approach for developing coverage control algorithms. In this approach, a mobile robot gives an equal importance to every neighbour robot coming under its communication range. We develop our control approach by making some of the mobile robots playing a more influential role than other members in the team. The approach based on this control strategy becomes efficient in terms of achieving a consensus on control inputs, say heading angle, velocity, etc. The decentralized control of mobile robots can also exhibit a cyclic behaviour under some physical constraints like a quantized orientation of mobile robot. We further investigate the cyclic behaviour appearing due to the quantized control of mobile robots under some conditions. Our nearest neighbour rule based approach offers a biased strategy in case of cyclic behaviour appearing in the team of mobile robots. We consider a clustering technique inside the team of mobile robots. Our decentralized control strategy calculates the similarity measure among the neighbours of a mobile robot. The team of mobile robots with the similarity measure based approach becomes efficient in achieving a fast consensus like on heading angle or velocity. We perform a rigorous mathematical analysis of our developed approach. We also develop a condition based on relaxed criteria for achieving consensus on velocity or heading angle of the mobile robots. Our validation approach is based on mathematical arguments and extensive computer simulations.
... Also, we propose a new obstacle avoidance method by which the robots maintain a given distance to the obstacles as well as mathematical justification of the proposed method. There are various applications for the suggested formation control algorithm such as sweep coverage [100,110,157], border patrolling [158], mine sweeping [159], ocean floor monitoring [160], and exploration in a sea floor [161]. ...
In this report, we try to improve the performance of existing approaches for search operations in multi-robot context. We propose three novel algorithms that are using a triangular grid pattern, i.e., robots certainly go through the vertices of a triangular grid during the search procedure. The main advantage of using a triangular grid pattern is that it is asymptotically optimal in terms of the minimum number of robots required for the complete coverage of an arbitrary bounded area. We use a new topological map which is made and shared by robots during the search operation. We consider an area that is unknown to the robots a priori with an arbitrary shape, containing some obstacles. Unlike many current heuristic algorithms, we give mathematically proofs of convergence of the algorithms. The computer simulation results for the proposed algorithms are presented using a simulator of real robots and environment. We evaluate the performance of the algorithms via experiments with real robots. We compare the performance of our own algorithms with three existing algorithms from other researchers. The results demonstrate the merits of our proposed solution. A further study on formation building with obstacle avoidance for a team of mobile robots is presented in this report. We propose a decentralized formation building with obstacle avoidance algorithm for a group of mobile robots to move in a defined geometric configuration. Furthermore, we consider a more complicated formation problem with a group of anonymous robots; these robots are not aware of their position in the final configuration and need to reach a consensus during the formation process. We propose a randomized algorithm for the anonymous robots that achieves the convergence to a desired configuration with probability 1. We also propose a novel obstacle avoidance rule, used in the formation building algorithm.
... Potential applications of our formation control of a group of robots are for sweep coverage [24] in operations like mine sweeping [25], boarder patrolling [26], environmental monitoring of disposal sites on the deep ocean floor [27], and sea floor surveying for hydrocarbon exploration [28]. ...
The paper presents a method for decentralized flocking and global formation building for a network of unicycles described by the standard kinematics equations with hard constraints on the vehicles linear and angular velocities. We propose decentralized motion coordination control algorithms for the robots so that they collectively move in a desired geometric pattern from any initial position. There are no predefined leaders in the group and only local information is required for the control. The effectiveness of the proposed control algorithms is illustrated via computer simulations.
... From this perspective, it is desirable nowadays that landmines detecting is carried out by robot capable of autonomously manipulating a typical handheld detector for remote sensing of buried landmines in a manner similar to a human operator. Such robotic systems appear to have an important role in detecting landmines and may provide a safe alternative to extremely hazardous operations [6], [7]. Thus robots could be used instead of humans and may bring efficiency and safety to the whole process. ...
Several countries all of the world are affected by landmines. The presence of mines represents a major threat to lives and causes economic problems. Currently, detecting and clearing mines demand specific expertise with special equipment. In this context, this paper offers the design and development of an intelligent controller which can control and enable the robot to detect mines by means of sensors and of processing the fused information to guide soldiers when passing landmines. This is accomplished by broken down the overall system into two subsystems: sensor technologies and robotic device. Sensors devices include infrared distance sensor, metal detector, ultrasonic range finder, accelerometer sensor, while the structure of the robot in our case consists mainly of a commercial off-the-shelf parts which are available at low costs. The proposed controller is mainly based on creating fuzzy rules that reflect the behaviors of soldier beings in controlling a robot in a well known landmine. Simulation and experimental results are presented her to prove the efficiency of the proposed approach. The results show that the system is able to detect landmines and guide soldiers while crossing mines area.
... More elaborate representation methods that include training algorithms for the adaptation of the agents to their environment and tasks are needed. Obtaining decentralized control that provides interesting collective behaviors is a central problem [39,47,59606162636465. In [62] Peleg presents a universal architecture for the decentralized control of groups of robots. ...
... The simulation results seem to indicate that assigning an equal number of agents to each target yields a better performance. Further, in [17], a multi-agent system is used for landmine detection. Local, suboptimal strategies based on a potential field type approach are designed, and their performance is compared for different agent group sizes. ...
... 17 shows the probability distribution of the two-agent separation in steady state and under an optimal policy for p = 0.1, 0.2, . . . , 0.9. ...
IntroductionNotation and problem formulationMathematical problem formulationAlgorithm overview and LP decompositionFixed point computationDiscussion and examplesConclusion
AcknowledgementsReferences
