We present an algorithm to explore an orthogonal polygon using a team of $p$ robots. This algorithm combines ideas from information-theoretic exploration algorithms and computational geometry based exploration algorithms. We show that the exploration time of our algorithm is competitive (as a function of $p$) with respect to the offline optimal exploration algorithm. The algorithm is based on a single-robot polygon exploration algorithm, a tree exploration algorithm for higher level planning and a submodular orienteering algorithm for lower level planning. We discuss how this strategy can be adapted to real-world settings to deal with noisy sensors. In addition to theoretical analysis, we investigate the performance of our algorithm through simulations for multiple robots and experiments with a single robot.
Northeastern University（东北大学）；Northeastern University at Qinhuangdao（东北大学秦皇岛分校）
The goal of coordinated multi-robot exploration tasks is to employ a team of autonomous robots to explore an unknown environment as quickly as possible. Compared with human-designed methods, which began with heuristic and rule-based approaches, learning-based methods enable individual robots to learn sophisticated and hard-to-design cooperation strategies through deep reinforcement learning technologies. However, in decentralized multi-robot exploration tasks, learning-based algorithms are still far from being universally applicable to the continuous space due to the difficulties associated wi…
Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts（多特蒙德应用科学与艺术大学）；University of Bremen（不来梅大学）；DFKI GmbH Robotics Innovation Center（DFKI GmbH机器人创新中心）
In this paper we introduce Q-Rock, a development cycle for the automated self-exploration and qualification of robot behaviors. With Q-Rock, we suggest a novel, integrative approach to automate robot development processes. Q-Rock combines several machine learning and reasoning techniques to deal with the increasing complexity in the design of robotic systems. The Q-Rock development cycle consists of three complementary processes: (1) automated exploration of capabilities that a given robotic hardware provides, (2) classification and semantic annotation of these capabilities to generate more co…
Intrinsic-Motivation Multi-Robot Social Formation Navigation with Coordinated Exploration
School of Computer Science and Technology（计算机科学与技术学院）；Wuhan University of Science and Technology（武汉科技大学）；Hubei Province Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing（湖北省智能信息处理重点实验室）
MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Applied Ocean Science and Engineering（麻省理工学院-伍兹霍尔海洋学研究所应用海洋科学与工程联合项目）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)（麻省理工学院）；Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)（伍兹霍尔海洋学研究所）
We present a novel POMDP problem formulation for a robot that must autonomously decide where to go to collect new and scientifically relevant images given a limited ability to communicate with its human operator. From this formulation we derive constraints and design principles for the observation model, reward model, and communication strategy of such a robot, exploring techniques to deal with the very high-dimensional observation space and scarcity of relevant training data. We introduce a novel active reward learning strategy based on making queries to help the robot minimize path "regret" …
We present a novel approach for interactive auditory object analysis with a humanoid robot. The robot elicits sensory information by physically shaking visually indistinguishable plastic capsules. It gathers the resulting audio signals from microphones that are embedded into the robotic ears. A neural network architecture learns from these signals to analyze properties of the contents of the containers. Specifically, we evaluate the material classification and weight prediction accuracy and demonstrate that the framework is fairly robust to acoustic real-world noise.
Dji Co（大疆创新科技有限公司）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Huzhou Institute of Zhejiang University（浙江大学湖州研究院）
This letter presents a complete framework Meeting-Merging-Mission for multi-robot exploration under communication restriction. Considering communication is limited in both bandwidth and range in the real world, we propose a lightweight environment presentation method and an efficient cooperative exploration strategy. For lower bandwidth, each robot utilizes specific polytopes to maintains free space and super frontier information (SFI) as the source for exploration decision-making. To reduce repeated exploration, we develop a mission-based protocol that drives robots to share collected informa…
Distributed multi-robot potential-field-based exploration with submap-based mapping and noise-augmented strategy
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；Inria Grenoble, Grenoble Alpes University（法国国家信息与自动化研究所格勒诺布尔分部，格勒诺布尔阿尔卑斯大学）；School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学电气与电子工程学院）
Engineering Product Development, Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学工程产品开发部）；School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学电子与电气工程学院）
University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；GRASP Laboratory（GRASP实验室）
Robotic exploration of underground environments is a particularly challenging problem due to communication, endurance, and traversability constraints which necessitate high degrees of autonomy and agility. These challenges are further exacerbated by the need to minimize human intervention for practical applications. While legged robots have the ability to traverse extremely challenging terrain, they also engender new challenges for planning, estimation, and control. In this work, we describe a fully autonomous system for multi-robot mine exploration and mapping using legged quadrupeds, as well…
University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Defence Science and Technology Group（国防科技集团）；Mission Systems Pty. Ltd.（任务系统私人有限公司）
Heterogeneous multi-robot systems are advantageous for operations in unknown environments because functionally specialised robots can gather environmental information, while others perform tasks. We define this decomposition as the scout-task robot architecture and show how it avoids the need to explicitly balance exploration and exploitation~by permitting the system to do both simultaneously. The challenge is to guide exploration in a way that improves overall performance for time-limited tasks. We derive a novel upper confidence bound for simultaneous exploration and exploitation based on mu…
The multi-robot coverage problem is an essential building block for systems that perform tasks like inspection or search and rescue. We discretize the coverage problem to induce a spatial graph of locations and represent robots as nodes in the graph. Then, we train a Graph Neural Network controller that leverages the spatial equivariance of the task to imitate an expert open-loop routing solution. This approach generalizes well to much larger maps and larger teams that are intractable for the expert. In particular, the model generalizes effectively to a simulation of ten quadrotors and dozens …
Autonomous exploration and mapping of unknown terrains employing single or multiple robots is an essential task in mobile robotics and has therefore been widely investigated. Nevertheless, given the lack of unified data sets, metrics, and platforms to evaluate the exploration approaches, we develop an autonomous robot exploration benchmark entitled Explore-Bench. The benchmark involves various exploration scenarios and presents two types of quantitative metrics to evaluate exploration efficiency and multi-robot cooperation. Explore-Bench is extremely useful as, recently, deep reinforcement lea…
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology（新墨西哥矿业与技术学院）
This paper addresses an Optimal Transport (OT)-based efficient multi-robot exploration problem, considering the energy constraints of a multi-robot system. The efficiency in this problem implies how a team of robots (agents) covers a given domain, reflecting a priority of areas of interest represented by a density distribution, rather than simply following a preset of uniform patterns. To achieve an efficient multi-robot exploration, the optimal transport theory that quantifies a distance between two density distributions is employed as a tool, which also serves as a means of performance measu…
University of Nevada, Reno（内华达大学里诺分校）；NTNU（挪威科技大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
This paper presents a novel strategy for autonomous teamed exploration of subterranean environments using legged and aerial robots. Tailored to the fact that subterranean settings, such as cave networks and underground mines, often involve complex, large-scale and multi-branched topologies, while wireless communication within them can be particularly challenging, this work is structured around the synergy of an onboard exploration path planner that allows for resilient long-term autonomy, and a multi-robot coordination framework. The onboard path planner is unified across legged and flying rob…
We describe a chemical robotic assistant equipped with a curiosity algorithm (CA) that can efficiently explore the state a complex chemical system can exhibit. The CA-robot is designed to explore formulations in an open-ended way with no explicit optimization target. By applying the CA-robot to the study of self-propelling multicomponent oil-in-water droplets, we are able to observe an order of magnitude more variety of droplet behaviours than possible with a random parameter search and given the same budget. We demonstrate that the CA-robot enabled the discovery of a sudden and highly specifi…
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory（美国国家航空航天局喷气推进实验室）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)（卡内基梅隆大学机器人研究所）
Volumetric objectives for exploration and perception tasks seek to capture a sense of value (or reward) for hypothetical observations at one or more camera views for robots operating in unknown environments. For example, a volumetric objective may reward robots proportionally to the expected volume of unknown space to be observed. We identify connections between existing information-theoretic and coverage objectives in terms of expected coverage, particularly that mutual information without noise is a special case of expected coverage. Likewise, we provide the first comparison, of which we are…
In this paper we address the challenge of exploration in deep reinforcement learning for robotic manipulation tasks. In sparse goal settings, an agent does not receive any positive feedback until randomly achieving the goal, which becomes infeasible for longer control sequences. Inspired by touch-based exploration observed in children, we formulate an intrinsic reward based on the sum of forces between a robot's force sensors and manipulation objects that encourages physical interaction. Furthermore, we introduce contact-prioritized experience replay, a sampling scheme that prioritizes contact…
Cooperative Risk-Aware Exploration in Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Systems Using Algorithmic Altruism
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Oklahoma State University（俄克拉荷马州立大学电气与计算机工程学院）；Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica（航空技术研究所）；University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）；University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology（新墨西哥矿业与技术学院）
An Optimal Transport (OT)-based decentralized collaborative multi-robot exploration strategy is proposed in this paper. This method is to achieve an efficient exploration with a predefined priority in the given domain. In this context, the efficiency indicates how a team of robots (agents) cover the domain reflecting the corresponding priority map (or degrees of importance) in the domain. The decentralized exploration implies that each agent carries out their exploration task independently in the absence of any supervisory agent/computer. When an agent encounters another agent within a communi…
Decentralized Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Collaborative Exploration for Indoor and Outdoor 3D Environments
College of Artificial Intelligence, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）人工智能学院）；Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学机械与自动化工程系）
Confidence-Controlled Exploration: Efficient Sparse-Reward Policy Learning for Robot Navigation
U.S. Army Research Laboratory（美国陆军研究实验室）；JP Morgan AI Research（摩根大通人工智能研究院）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）
In this work, we present a novel distributed method for constructing an occupancy grid map of an unknown environment using a swarm of robots with global localization capabilities and limited inter-robot communication. The robots explore the domain by performing Levy walks in which their headings are defined by maximizing the mutual information between the robot's estimate of its environment in the form of an occupancy grid map and the distance measurements that it is likely to obtain when it moves in that direction. Each robot is equipped with laser range sensors, and it builds its occupancy g…
RoboEXP: Action-Conditioned Scene Graph via Interactive Exploration for Robotic Manipulation
Peking University（北京大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Amazon（亚马逊公司）
