Many robotics tasks require autonomous exploration by teams of robots. In difficult or large environments, communication drop-out complicates this task. Several approaches exist that aim to keep the team connected, but even so there is an inherent limit to the range that can be explored. In this paper we describe and examine Role-Based Exploration, an approach that uses mobile relays to ferry i...

Distributed team training, often in joint settings, is becoming more and more important in the military training today. As the teams and training staff are not physically on the same location, special attention should be paid to performance measurement and feedback. The question is what should be measured in distributed training and how the training staff should be supported in doing this. This...

Delayed-state decentralised data fusion (DS-DDF) is proposed as a general methodology for consistent DDF, which does not impose constraints on network topology. The resulting estimates, although lagged in time, are optimal, equal to a centralised solution. The method is demonstrated in the context of dynamic node tracking and localisation, where a team of mobile robots track each other’s positi...

When designing a mobile robotic team, researchers are faced with many design choices. This paper discusses the design and implementation of a heterogeneous team consisting of two types of robots with significantly different sensing and control capabilities intended to accomplish a similar task. Two new robotic platforms, the COTS Scout and the MegaScout are described along with their respective...

Autonomous Mobile Robotics is a very active research field. The RoboCup challenge provides a standard benchmark environment and the design of a small size RoboCup team is an excellent way to innovate in this field. The evolving design of the team is presented as well as some of the experience accumulated from two participations in this competition. Some key issues are discussed and the adopted ...

A novel architecture for distributed control of a team of heterogeneous mobile robots is introduced. Design as well as implementation details are presented. An example application for a surveillance task is discussed.

The development of mobile applications is becoming one of the growth sectors of the local software economy. In addition to a lot of mobile users, developers also have a lot of choices in developing mobile applications. A large selection resulted in the development technology makes developer team need to invest the time to learn each platform. This was definite by the competition of mobile appli...

Introduction In early 2004, WDSGlobal brought together three independent development regions — the United States (Seattle), United Kingdom (Poole), and China (Singapore) — to form an around-the-clock Extreme Programming team. I was brought in as the Extreme Programming coach for the U.S. in early 2004. This paper describes the challenges the team faced in this environment, lessons learned, and ...

This paper presents an approach for deploying a team of mobile sensor nodes to form a sensor network in indoor environments. The challenge in this work is that the mobile sensor nodes have no ability for localization or obstacle avoidance. Thus, our approach entails the use of more capable “helper” robots that “herd” the mobile sensor nodes into their deployment positions. To extensively explor...

The aim of this paper is to present a distributed algorithm for big data classification, and its application for Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) segmentation. We choose the well-known classification method which is the c-means method. The proposed method is introduced in order to perform a cognitive program which is assigned to be implemented on a parallel and distributed machine based on mobil...