Entries by Briana Tyson

Asymptotically Optimal Planning for Non-myopic Multi-Robot Information Gathering

March 27, 2020 /0 Comments/in /by

A recent paper by members of the DCIST alliance develops a novel highly scalable sampling-based planning algorithm for multi-robot active information acquisition tasks in complex environments. Active information gathering scenarios include target localization and tracking, active Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), surveillance, environmental monitoring and others. The goal is to compute control policies for mobile robot […]

Active Exploration in Signed Distance Fields

March 20, 2020 /0 Comments/in /by

When performing tasks in unknown environments it is useful for a team of robots to have a good map of the area to assist in efficient, collision-free planning and navigation. A recent paper by members of the DCIST alliance tackles the problem of autonomous mapping of unknown environments using information theoretic metrics and signed distance […]

Learning Multi-Agent Policies from Observations

March 13, 2020 /0 Comments/in /by

A recent paper from the DCIST team introduces a framework for learning to perform multi-robot missions by observing an expert system executing the same mission. The expert system is a team of robots equipped with a library of controllers, each designed to solve a specific task. The expert system’s policy selects the controller necessary to […]

Sim-to-(Multi)-Real: Transfer of Low-Level Robust Control Policies to Multiple Quadrotors

March 6, 2020 /0 Comments/in /by

A recent paper by members of the DCIST alliance develops the use of reinforcement learning techniques to train policies in simulation that transfer remarkably well to multiple different physical quadrotors. Quadrotor stabilizing controllers often require careful, model-specific tuning for safe operation. The policies developed are low-level, i.e., they map the rotorcrafts’ state directly to the […]

Planning with Uncertain Specifications (PUnS)

February 28, 2020 /0 Comments/in /by

Consider the task of setting a dinner table. It involves placing the appropriate serving utensils and silverware according to the dishes being served. Some of the objects need to be placed in a particular order as they might be stacked on top of each other or due to cultural traditions. Many real-world tasks demonstrate such […]

Synthesis of a Time-Varying Communication Network by Robot Teams with Information Propagation Guarantees

February 21, 2020 /0 Comments/in /by

A recent paper by Xi Yu and M. Ani Hsieh from the University of Pennsylvania presents a distributed control and coordination strategy that allows a swarm of mobile robots to form an intermittently connected communication network as they monitor a given environment. The approach assumes robots are tasked to patrol a set of perimeters in […]

Learning Decentralized Controllers with Graph Neural Networks

February 10, 2020 /0 Comments/in /by

A recent paper by members of the DCIST alliance develops a method for distributed control of large networks of mobile robots with interacting dynamics and sparsely available communications. Their approach is to learn local controllers that require only local information and communications at test time by imitating the policy of centralized controllers using global information […]

Heterogeneity and Uncertainty in Perimeter Defense

February 8, 2020 /0 Comments/in /by

Surveillance of perimeters and securing perimeters are important tasks in civilian and military defense applications, and it has become practical to deploy a large number of autonomous agents to address these problems using multi-robot systems.   A recent paper by members of the DCIST alliance formulates this scenario as a variant of multi-player pursuit-evasion games, where […]

Human Information Processing in Complex Networks

February 7, 2020 /0 Comments/in /by

In this work, we study the structure of real-world communication systems to understand how information can be rapidly and efficiently communicated to humans, for example from swarms of drones or other agents. Humans constantly receive information from systems of interconnected stimuli or concepts — from language and music to literature and science — yet it […]

Resilient Active Information Acquisition with Mobile Robots

February 5, 2020 /0 Comments/in /by

In the future, teams of heterogeneous robot teams will be operating in unknown and adversarial environments.   In failure prone or adversarial environments, the capability of resilience is crucial to ensuring the robots can complete their mission. Mission resilience to robot failures, sensor attacks or communication disruptions is currently an afterthought leading to optimal over-provisioned designs.   […]