Planning for Opportunistic Surveillance with Multiple Robots - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

Planning for Opportunistic Surveillance with Multiple Robots

Dinesh Thakur, Maxim Likhachev, James Keller, Vijay Kumar, Vladimir Dobrokhodov, Kevin Jones, Jeff Wurz, and Isaac Kaminer
Conference Paper, Proceedings of (IROS) IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pp. 5750 - 5757, November, 2013

Abstract

We are interested in the multiple robot surveillance problem where robots must allocate waypoints to be visited among themselves and plan paths through different waypoints while avoiding obstacles. Furthermore, the robots are allocated specific times to reach their respective goal locations and as a result they have to decide which robots have to visit which waypoints. Such a problem has the challenge of computing the allocation of waypoints across robots, ordering for these waypoints and dynamical feasibility of the paths between waypoints. We present an algorithm that runs a series of graph searches to solve the problem and provide theoretical analysis that our approach yields an optimal solution. We present simulated results as well as experiments on two UAVs that validate the capability of our algorithm. For a single robot, we can solve instances having 10-15 waypoints and for multiple robots, instances having five robots and 10 waypoints can be solved.

BibTeX

@conference{Thakur-2013-109538,
author = {Dinesh Thakur and Maxim Likhachev and James Keller and Vijay Kumar and Vladimir Dobrokhodov and Kevin Jones and Jeff Wurz and Isaac Kaminer},
title = {Planning for Opportunistic Surveillance with Multiple Robots},
booktitle = {Proceedings of (IROS) IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems},
year = {2013},
month = {November},
pages = {5750 - 5757},
}