Trading Safety Versus Performance: Rapid Deployment of Robotic Swarms With Robust Performance Constraints

Trading Safety Versus Performance: Rapid Deployment of Robotic Swarms with Robust Performance Constraints

In this paper we consider a stochastic deployment problem, where a robotic swarm is tasked with the objective of positioning at least one robot at each of a set of pre-assigned targets while meeting a temporal deadline. Travel times and failure rates are stochastic but related, inasmuch as failure rates increase with speed. To maximize chances of success while meeting the deadline, a control st...

Robust Human Interaction with Robotic Swarms

Performance Bounds on Spatial Coverage Tasks by Stochastic Robotic Swarms

This paper presents a novel procedure for computing parameters of a robotic swarm that guarantee coverage performance by the swarm within a specified error from a target spatial distribution. The main contribution of this paper is the analysis of the dependence of this error on two key parameters: the number of robots in the swarm and the robot sensing radius. The robots cannot localize or comm...

Decentralized probabilistic density control of autonomous swarms with safety constraints

This paper presents a Markov chain based approach for the probabilistic density control of a large number, swarm, of autonomous agents. The proposed approach specifies the time evolution of the probabilistic density distribution by using a Markov chain, which guides the swarm to a desired steady-state distribution, while satisfying the prescribed ergodicity, motion, and safety constraints. This...

Trading security for control performance in distributed robotic applications

Networked embedded and control systems are largely used in factory automation for production and logistics tasks. In this application domain, security has become a prominent issue due to the critical consequences a cyber attack may have in terms of safety and financial losses. Unfortunately security solutions compete against control applications for the often scarce resources of embedded platfo...