Multirobot Control Strategies for Collective Transport

One potential application of multirobot systems is collective transport, a task in which multiple robots collaboratively move a payload that is too large or heavy for a single robot. In this review, we highlight a variety of control strategies for collective transport that have been developed over the past three decades. We characterize the problem scenarios that have been addressed in terms of the control objective, the robot platform and its interaction with the payload, and the robots’ capabilities and information about the payload and environment. We categorize the control strategies according to whether their sensing, computation, and communication functions are performed by a centralized supervisor or specialized robot or autonomously by the robots. We provide an overview of progress toward control strategies that can be implemented on robots with expanded autonomous functionality in uncertain environments using limited information, and we suggest directions for future work on developing such controllers. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems, Volume 5 is May 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Substitutability and Complementarity of Municipal Electric Bike Sharing Systems against Other Forms of Urban Transport

The current quantitative and qualitative development of bike-sharing systems worldwide involves particular implications regarding the level of sustainability of urban development and city residents’ quality of life. To make these implications as large as possible as well as the most positive, it is essential that the people who use municipal bikes on a regular basis to the largest extent possible abandon car travel at the same time. Thanks to their operational characteristics, electric bikes should enable meeting the transport needs of a wider group of city residents compared with traditional bicycles. The main aim of this study was therefore to check whether the municipal electric bike system (MEVO) in Gdańsk-Gdynia-Sopot metropolitan area of Poland lived up to the hopes placed upon it by policymakers. Therefore, the article tests the hypothesis indicating that the municipal electric bike systems constitute a substitutable form of transportation against passenger cars to a larger extent than against collective urban transport and walking trips. The analysis was performed based on the results of primary studies conducted among the users of MEVO. The data show that the MEVO was a substitutable form of transportation against collective transport and walking trips to a larger extent than against passenger cars. Through logistic regression analysis, the variables concerning the probability of replacing car trips by MEVO bicycles were determined. Among the analyzed variables, the following turned out to be statistically significant: age, the number of people in the household, the number of cars in the household, the distance from work, and gender. The results therefore indicate that substituting in favor of electro bikes was more probable for younger people with fewer people in the household and a distance to travel below 3 km, whereas it was less probable for people with more cars in the household or traveling a distance longer than 10 km. Additionally, females were more likely to choose the bike system.

APPROACHES TO FORMALIZING THE CONCEPT OF TRANSPORT BEHAVIOR OF THE POPULATION OF URBAN AGGLOMERATIONS

The article deals with the field of knowledge about the transport behavior of passengers in complex transport systems of megacities, large cities and their agglomerations, in which there is a great variety of transport systems. These systems form hierarchies, where each level is described by mathematical models of homogeneous transport systems and serves as a decision-making area for implementing collective transport behavior. A review of the works of foreign and domestic authors dealing with the definition of the concept of “transport behavior”, its semantic content, a new approach to the definition of transport behavior is presented. The functional description of the “transport system of individual behavior” is presented as a collective result of the decisions made on trips that occur at certain time intervals in the transport system of the agglomeration. The mathematical description of the transport system based on the theory of macrosystems is given as a multicomponent heterogeneous open system, in which there are many decisions about the trip and the corresponding set of transport processes that ensure the achievement of the efficiency criterion.