Distributed Constraint Reasoning Applied to Multi-robot Exploration

Doniec, Arnaud; Bouraqadi, Noury; Defoort, Michaël; Le, Van Tuan; Stinckwich, Serge

doi:10.1109/ictai.2009.104

Cited by 17 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Robots might get disconnected and not be able to communicate with each other when they are out of WiFi range. However, this issue can be mitigated by taking into account network connectivity in path planning [9,31].…”

Section: Fleetmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1: deployed_vm_count = 0 2: Copy robot prototype VM to a temporary storage area of each node o ∈ O 3: for i = 1 to robots_per_node do 4: Clone the prototype VM and assign a new IP address to the cloned VM 5: deployed_vm_count = deployed_vm_count + 1 6: if deployed_vm_count == max_team_size then 7: return // deployment complete 8: end if 9: end for…”

Section: Algorithm 2 Robot Controllers Deploymentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Robots form a wireless Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) that is subject to disconnection when they move away from each other to perform their tasks [9,31]. This unreliability can have serious impacts on coordination strategies among robots.…”

Section: Network Reliabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Unfortunately, building optimal or near-optimal coordination strategies is not straightforward. This is why there is substantial effort put by the research community to address instances of this problem such as the multi-robot exploration and mapping [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Building a ROS-Based Testbed for Realistic Multi-Robot Simulation: Taking the Exploration as an Example

Yan

Fabresse

Laval³

et al. 2017

Robotics

Self Cite

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While the robotics community agrees that the benchmarking is of high importance to objectively compare different solutions, there are only few and limited tools to support it. To address this issue in the context of multi-robot systems, we have defined a benchmarking process based on experimental designs, which aimed at improving the reproducibility of experiments by making explicit all elements of a benchmark such as parameters, measurements and metrics. We have also developed a ROS (Robot Operating System)-based testbed with the goal of making it easy for users to validate, benchmark, and compare different algorithms including coordination strategies. Our testbed uses the MORSE (Modular OpenRobots Simulation Engine) simulator for realistic simulation and a computer cluster for decentralized computation. In this paper, we present our testbed in details with the architecture and infrastructure, the issues encountered in implementing the infrastructure, and the automation of the deployment. We also report a series of experiments on multi-robot exploration, in order to demonstrate the capabilities of our testbed.

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Section: Fleetmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Algorithm 2 Robot Controllers Deploymentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Network Reliabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Building a ROS-Based Testbed for Realistic Multi-Robot Simulation: Taking the Exploration as an Example

Yan

Fabresse

Laval³

et al. 2017

Robotics

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The MACBETH [20] architecture makes use of a combination of hierarchical task networks and CP, where a human user specifies missions to a team of autonomous agents via a playbook graphic user interface. Another proposed method uses distributed constraint satisfaction problems (disCSP) to solve multi-robot exploration problems [21].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Constraint Programming Approach to Multi-Robot Task Allocation and Scheduling in Retirement Homes

Booth

Nejat

Beck

2016

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract.We study the application of constraint programming (CP) to the planning and scheduling of multiple social robots interacting with residents in a retirement home. The robots autonomously organize and facilitate group and individual activities among residents. The application is a multi-robot task allocation and scheduling problem in which task plans must be determined that integrate with resident schedules. The problem involves reasoning about disjoint time windows, inter-schedule task dependencies, user and robot travel times, as well as robot energy levels. We propose mixed-integer programming (MIP) and CP approaches for this problem and investigate methods for improving our initial CP approach using symmetry breaking, variable ordering heuristics, and large neighbourhood search. We introduce a relaxed CP model for determining provable bounds on solution quality. Experiments indicate substantial superiority of the initial CP approach over MIP, and subsequent significant improvements in the CP approach through our manipulations. This work is one of the few, of which we are aware, that applies CP to multi-robot task allocation and scheduling problems. Our results demonstrate the promise of CP scheduling technology as a general optimization infrastructure for such problems.

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The Impact of Wireless Communication on Distributed Constraint Satisfaction

Wahbi

Brown

2014

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Distributed constraint satisfaction (DisCSP) models decision problems where physically distributed agents control different decision variables, but must communicate with each other to agree on a global solution. Most DisCSP research assumes an abstract communication layer based on a peer-to-peer wired network. However, many practical applications of distributed reasoning require to be implemented over wireless networks, which impose different communication costs, and may affect the performance of DisCSP algorithms. We study the impact of wireless network topology and routing on two leading DisCSP algorithms -ABT and AFC-ng. We introduce a new framework for experiments which models different communication layers. We show that the communication layer has a significant impact on the messaging costs, which can vary by over an order of magnitude. We also show the impact on computation time, where the equivalent non-concurrent constraint checks can vary by a factor of 6. Finally, we show that given a fixed agent ordering, changing the communications topology can increase the number of messages by up to 50%.

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Distributed Constraint Reasoning Applied to Multi-robot Exploration

Cited by 17 publications

References 11 publications

Building a ROS-Based Testbed for Realistic Multi-Robot Simulation: Taking the Exploration as an Example

Building a ROS-Based Testbed for Realistic Multi-Robot Simulation: Taking the Exploration as an Example

A Constraint Programming Approach to Multi-Robot Task Allocation and Scheduling in Retirement Homes

The Impact of Wireless Communication on Distributed Constraint Satisfaction

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