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We consider the problem of multi-robot sensor coverage, which deals with deploying a multi-robot team in an environment and optimizing the sensing quality of the overall environment. As real-world environments involve a variety of sensory information, and individual robots are limited in their available number of sensors, successful multi-robot sensor coverage requires the deployment of robots in such a way that each individual team member’s sensing quality is maximized. Additionally, because individual robots have varying complements of sensors and both robots and sensors can fail, robots must be able to adapt and adjust how they value each sensing capability in order to obtain the most complete view of the environment, even through changes in team composition. We introduce a novel formulation for sensor coverage by multi-robot teams with heterogeneous sensing capabilities that maximizes each robot's sensing quality, balancing the varying sensing capabilities of individual robots based on the overall team composition. We propose a solution based on regularized optimization that uses sparsity-inducing terms to ensure a robot team focuses on all possible event types, and which we show is proven to converge to the optimal solution. Through extensive simulation, we show that our approach is able to effectively deploy a multi-robot team to maximize the sensing quality of an environment, responding to failures in the multi-robot team more robustly than non-adaptive approaches.
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Tractable Planning for Coordinated Story Capture: Sequential Stochastic Decoupling
We consider the problem of deploying robots to observe the evolution of a stochastic process in order to output a sequence of observations that fit some given specification. This problem often arises in contexts such as event reporting, situation depiction, and automated narrative generation. The paper extends our prior work by formulating and examining the multi-robot case: a team of robots move about, each recording what they observe, and, if they manage to capture some event, communicating that fact with the group. In the end, all events from all the robots are collated to provide a cumulative output. A plan is used to decide what each robot will attempt to capture next, based on the state of the world and the events that have been captured (collectively) so far. This paper focuses on the question of how to compute effective multi-robot plans. A monolithic treatment, involving the optimal selection of joint choices, i.e., choosing the next elements to attempt to capture by all robots, is formulated where costs are minimized in an expected sense. Since such plans are prohibitive to compute, variants based on an approximation scheme based on solving a sequence of individual planning problems are then introduced. This scheme sacrifices some solution quality but requires far less computational expense; we show this permits one to scale to greater numbers of robots.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1849291
- PAR ID:
- 10333066
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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