Research on the co-ordination of multiple mobile robots has to address three main problems: (i) how to appropriately divide the functionality of the system into multiple robots, (ii) how to manage the dynamic configuration of the system, and (iii) how to realise co-operation behaviour. This paper will concentrate on the third aspect. More specifically, the aim of our research is to develop a te...

Mobile robots are cyber-physical systems where the cyberspace and the physical world are strongly coupled. Attacks against mobile robots can transcend cyber defenses and escalate into disastrous consequences in the physical world. In this paper, we focus on the detection of active attacks that are capable of directly influencing robot mission operation. Through leveraging physical dynamics of m...

In this article, a fast and reliable map-merging algorithm is proposed to produce a global two dimensional map of an indoor environment in a multi-robot simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) process. In SLAM process, to find its way in this environment, a robot should be able to determine its position relative to a map formed from its observations. To solve this complex problem, simultan...

One of the most important reasons for the popularity of mobile robots in industrial manufacturing is their capability to move and operate freely. In order for the robots to perform to the expectations in manufacturing, their position and orientation must be determined accurately. In addition, there is a strong tendency to grant more autonomy to robots when they operate in hazardous or unknown e...

Current mobile robots generally fall into one of two categories as far as reliability is concerned – highly unreliable, or very expensive. Most fall into the first category, requiring teams of graduate students or staff engineers to coddle them in the days and hours before a brief demonstration. The few robots that exhibit very high reliability, such as those used by NASA for planetary explorat...

This paper presents an algorithm for collaborative mobile robot localization based on probabilistic methods (Monte Carlo localization) used in assistant robots. When a root detects another in the same environment, a probabilistic method is used to synchronize each robot’s belief. As a result, the robots localize themselves faster and maintain higher accuracy. The technique has been implemented ...

This paper presents a fail-safe platform on which cooperative mobile robots rely for their motion. The platform consists of a collision prevention protocol for a dynamic group of cooperative mobile robots with asynchronous communications. The collision prevention protocol is timefree, in the sense that it never relies on physical time, which makes it extremely robust for timing uncertainty comm...

This paper presents, analyzes and compares two different kinematic modeling methods for obtaining the kinematic model of general wheeled mobile robots. The two kinematic modeling methods are based on absolutely different concepts: on the one hand the constraints of each wheel and on the other the well known homogeneous transformation matrix theory. These methods are applied to the most common w...

This paper describes application areas for mobile service robots in offshore oil and gas producing environments, requirements and restrictions for the use of the robots together with a first prototype and its evaluation in a field test. The field of offshore oil and gas production is analyzed in the first part to identify possible application scenarios for mobile automation. It shows that there...

Many of the most promising applications for mobile robots require very high reliability. The current generation of mobile robots is, for the most part, highly unreliable. The few mobile robots that currently demonstrate high reliability achieve this reliability at a high financial cost. In order for mobile robots to be more widely used, it will be necessary to find ways to provide high mission ...