This paper provides an overview of our framework, called physicomimetics, for the distributed control of swarms of robots. We focus on robotic behaviors that are similar to those shown by solids, liquids, and gases. Solid formations are useful for distributed sensing tasks, while liquids are for obstacle avoidance tasks. Gases are handy for coverage tasks, such as surveillance and sweeping. The...

This paper presents a first part, Part-I of two, of a complete exploration and navigation methodology that enables a robot to safely navigate in an unknown environment. Reactive sensor-based navigation tasks and control laws are derived from the interaction between the robot and its workspace. The perception is performed by a 2-D laser range finder mounted on the robot. Reactive navigation task...

We propose a model for learning the articulated motion of human arm and hand grabbing. The goal is to generate plausible trajectories of joints that mimic the human movement using deformation information. The trajectories are then mapped to a constraint space. These constraints can be the space of start and end configuration of the human body and task-specific constraints such as avoiding an ob...

An obstacle avoidance method for use in person following for vision-based autonomous land vehicle (ALV) guidance is proposed. This method is based on the use of vehicle location estimation and a quadratic pattern classifier, and aims to guide the ALV to follow a walking person in front by navigating along a derived collision-free path. Before generating the collision-free path, the person’s loc...

EvacSim is a multi-agent building evacuation simulation featuring pedestrian occupant agents occupying twodimensional continuous free-space to simulate pedestrian egress for building evaluation and evacuation planning support. We detail pedestrian model elements that govern microscopic agent movement such as personal space preservation, obstacle avoidance and moving together as a crowd. We vali...

This paper describes the design of a system for estimating the pose of a camera mounted on a vehicle which moves over a flat floor. The system has been designed to work in conjunction with an obstacle avoidance scheme. Measurements are derived from a sequence of images captured by a single camera rigidly mounted on the vehicle and looking at the floor, and combined with measurements of the vehi...

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to reactive obstacle avoidance for nonholonomic systems. The method is based on the deformation of an initial trajectory computed by a motion planner. The deformation we perform keeps the nonholonomic constraints of the system satisfied. The deformation algorithm is based on a potential field generated by obstacles. We applied this approach to the mobi...

Planning trajectories for nonholonomic systems is difficult and computationally expensive. When facing unexpected events, it may therefore be preferable to deform in some way the initially planned trajectory rather than to re-plan entirely a new one. We suggest here a method based on affine transformations to make such deformations. This method is exact and fast: the deformations and the result...

In this thesis the potential of visual servoing techniques for vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) UAV platforms is explored. An overview of UAV applications and state-of-theart quadrotors is provided, backed up by the necessary theoretical background. Visual servoing based solutions of the important flight tasks (such as vertical take-off and landing, obstacle avoidance and attitude estimatio...