A Decentralized Control Strategy for Resilient Connectivity Maintenance in Multi-robot Systems Subject to Failures

Optimizing the operation of cooperative multi-robot systems that can cooperatively act in large and complex environments has become an important focal area of research. This issue is motivated by many applications involving a set of cooperative robots that have to decide in a decentralized way how to execute a large set of tasks in partially observable and uncertain environments. Such decision problems are encountered while developing exploration rovers, teams of patrolling robots, rescue-robot colonies, mine-clearance robots, et cetera. In this chapter, we introduce problematics related to the decentralized control of multi-robot systems. We first describe some applicative domains and review the main characteristics of the decision problems the robots must deal with. Then, we review some existing approaches to solve problems of multiagent decentralized control in stochastic environments. We present the Decentralized Markov Decision Processes and discuss their applicability to real-world multi-robot applications. Then, we introduce OC-DEC-MDPs and 2V-DEC-MDPs which have been developed to increase the applicability of DEC-MDPs.

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A Framework for Prototyping of Autonomous Multi-Robot Systems for Search, Rescue, and Reconnaissance

Prototyping of Robotic Systems - Advances in Computational Intelligence and Robotics ◽

10.4018/978-1-4666-0176-5.ch014 ◽

2012 ◽

pp. 407-437

Author(s):

Sedat Dogru ◽

Sebahattin Topal ◽

Aydan M. Erkmen ◽

Ismet Erkmen

Keyword(s):

Wireless Sensor Networks ◽

Sensor Networks ◽

Search And Rescue ◽

Wireless Sensor ◽

Complex Environments ◽

Robot Systems ◽

Design Characteristics ◽

Hardware Platforms ◽

Connectivity Maintenance ◽

Multi Robot

Robots consistently help humans in dangerous and complex tasks by providing information about, and executing tasks in disaster areas that are highly unstructured, uncertain, possibly hostile, and sometimes not reachable to humans directly. Prototyping autonomous multi-robot systems in disaster scenarios both as hardware platforms and software can provide foundational infrastructure in comparing performance of different methodologies developed for search, rescue, monitoring and reconnaissance. In this chapter, the authors discuss prototyping modules of heterogeneous multi-robot networks and their design characteristics for two different scenarios, namely Search and Rescue in unstructured complex environments, and connectivity maintenance in Sycophant Wireless Sensor Networks which are static ecto-parasitic clandestine sensor networks mounted incognito on mobile agents using only the agent’s mobility without intervention, and are cooperating with sparse mobile robot sensor networks.

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Enhanced Connectivity Maintenance for Multi–Robot Systems

IFAC Proceedings Volumes ◽

10.3182/20120905-3-hr-2030.00030 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 45 (22) ◽

pp. 319-324 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Lorenzo Sabattini ◽

Andrea Gasparri ◽

Cristian Secchi ◽

Nikhil Chopra

Keyword(s):

Robot Systems ◽

Connectivity Maintenance ◽

Multi Robot

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