Faculty Publications
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Publications by NITK Faculty
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Item Distributed, complete, multi-robot coverage of initially unknown environments using repartitioning(International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS) info@ifaamas.org, 2014) Hungerford, K.; Dasgupta, P.; Guruprasad, K.R.We consider the problem of coverage path planning by multiple robots in an environment where the location and geometry of obstacles are initially unknown to the robots. We propose a novel algorithm where the robots initially partition the environment using Voronoi partitioning. Each robot then uses an auction-based algorithm to reallocate inaccessible portions of its initial Voronoi cell to robots in neighboring Voronoi cells so that each robot is responsible for covering a set of contiguous connected regions. We have verified the performance of our algorithm on e-puck robots within the Webots simulator in different environments with different obstacle geometries and shown that it performs complete, non-overlapping coverage. © © 2014, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (www.ifaamas.org). All rights reserved.Item A repartitioning algorithm to guarantee complete, non-overlapping planar coverage with multiple robots(Springer Verlag service@springer.de, 2016) Hungerford, K.; Dasgupta, P.; Guruprasad, K.R.We consider the problem of coverage path planning in an initially unknown or partially known planar environment using multiple robots. Previously, Voronoi partitioning has been proposed as a suitable technique for coverage path planning where the free space in the environment is partitioned into non-overlapping regions called Voronoi cells based on the initial positions of the robots, and one robot is allocated to perform coverage in each region. However, a crucial problem arises if such a partitioning scheme is used in an environment where the location of obstacles is not known a priori—while performing coverage, a robot might perceive an obstacle that occludes its access to portions of its Voronoi cell and this obstacle might prevent the robot from completely covering its allocated region. This would either result in portions of the environment remaining uncovered or requires additional path planning by robots to cover the disconnected regions. To address this problem, we propose a novel algorithm that allows robots to coordinate the coverage of inaccessible portions of their Voronoi cell with robots in neighboring Voronoi cells so that they can repartition the initial Voronoi cells and cover a set of contiguous, connected regions. We have proved analytically that our proposed algorithm guarantees complete, non-overlapping coverage. We have also quantified the performance of our algorithm on e-puck robots within the Webots simulator in different environments with different obstacle geometries and shown that it successfully performs complete, non-overlapping coverage. © Springer Japan 2016.Item The COMRADE system for multirobot autonomous landmine detection in postconflict regions(Hindawi Publishing Corporation 410 Park Avenue, 15th Floor, 287 pmb New York NY 10022, 2015) Dasgupta, P.; Baca, J.; Guruprasad, K.R.; Muñoz-Meléndez, A.; Jumadinova, J.We consider the problem of autonomous landmine detection using a team of mobile robots. Previous research on robotic landmine detection mostly employs a single robot equipped with a landmine detection sensor to detect landmines. We envisage that the quality of landmine detection can be significantly improved if multiple robots are coordinated to detect landmines in a cooperative manner by incrementally fusing the landmine-related sensor information they collect and then use that information to visit locations of potential landmines. Towards this objective, we describe a multirobot system called COMRADES to address different aspects of the autonomous landmine detection problem including distributed area coverage to detect and locate landmines, information aggregation to fuse the sensor information obtained by different robots, and multirobot task allocation (MRTA) to enable different robots to determine a suitable sequence to visit locations of potential landmines while reducing the time required and battery expended. We have used commercially available all-terrain robots called Coroware Explorer that are customized with a metal detector to detect metallic objects including landmines, as well as indoor Corobot robots, both in simulation and in physical experiments, to test the different techniques in COMRADES. © 2015 Prithviraj Dasgupta et al.