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Register a new userRouting Multiple Unmanned Vehicles in GPS-Denied Environments
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This article aims to develop novel path planning algorithms required to deploy multiple unmanned vehicles in Global Positioning System (GPS) denied environments. Unmanned vehicles (ground or aerial) are ideal platforms for executing monitoring and data gathering tasks in civil infrastructure management, agriculture, public safety, law enforcement, disaster relief and transportation. Significant advancement in the area of path planning for unmanned vehicles over the last decade has resulted in a suite of algorithms that can handle heterogeneity, motion and other on-board resource constraints for these vehicles. However, most of these routing and path planning algorithms rely on the availability of the GPS information. Unintentional and intentional interference and design errors can cause GPS service outages, which in turn, can crucially affect all the systems that depend on GPS information. This article addresses a multiple vehicle path planning problem that arises while deploying a team of unmanned vehicles for monitoring applications in GPS-denied environments and presents a mathematical formulation and algorithms for solving the problem. Simulation results are also presented to corroborate the performance of the proposed algorithms.
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Most of the routing algorithms for unmanned vehicles, that arise in data gathering and monitoring applications in the literature, rely on the Global Positioning System (GPS) information for localization. However, disruption of GPS signals either intentionally or unintentionally could potentially render these algorithms not applicable. In this article, we present a novel method to address this difficulty by combining methods from cooperative localization and routing. In particular, the article formulates a fundamental combinatorial optimization problem to plan routes for an unmanned vehicle in a GPS-restricted environment while enabling localization for the vehicle. We also develop algorithms to compute optimal paths for the vehicle using the proposed formulation. Extensive simulation results are also presented to corroborate the effectiveness and performance of the proposed formulation and algorithms.
This paper presents a novel data-driven navigation system to navigate an Unmanned Vehicle (UV) in GPS-denied, feature-deficient environments such as tunnels, or mines. The method utilizes Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, also referred to as landmarks, as range sensors that are carried by the vehicle and are deployed in the environment to enable localization as the vehicle traverses its pre-defined path through the tunnel. A key question that arises in such scenario is to estimate and reduce the number of landmarks required for localization before the start of the mission, given some information about the environment. The main constraint of the problem is to keep the maximum uncertainty in the position estimate near a desired value. In this article, we combine techniques from estimation, machine learning, and mixed-integer convex optimization to develop a systematic method to perform localization and navigate the UV through the environment while ensuring minimum number of landmarks are used and all the mission constraints are satisfied.
Path planning algorithms for unmanned aerial or ground vehicles, in many surveillance applications, rely on Global Positioning System (GPS) information for localization. However, disruption of GPS signals, by intention or otherwise, can render these plans and algorithms ineffective. This article provides a way of addressing this issue by utilizing stationary landmarks to aid localization in such GPS-disrupted or GPS-denied environment. In particular, given the vehicles path, we formulate a landmark-placement problem and present algorithms to place the minimum number of landmarks while satisfying the localization, sensing, and collision-avoidance constraints. The performance of such a placement is also evaluated via extensive simulations on ground robots.
Logistics has gained great attentions with the prosperous development of commerce, which is often seen as the classic optimal vehicle routing problem. Meanwhile, electric vehicle (EV) has been widely used in logistic fleet to curb the emission of green house gases in recent years. Solving the optimization problem of joint routing and charging of multiple EVs is in a urgent need, whose objective function includes charging time, charging cost, EVs travel time, usage fees of EV and revenue from serving customers. This joint problem is formulated as a mixed integer programming (MIP) problem, which, however, is NP-hard due to integer restrictions and bilinear terms from the coupling between routing and charging decisions. The main contribution of this paper lies at proposing an efficient two stage algorithm that can decompose the original MIP problem into two linear programming (LP) problems, by exploiting the exactness of LP relaxation and eliminating the coupled term. This algorithm can achieve a nearoptimal solution in polynomial time. In addition, another variant algorithm is proposed based on the two stage one, to further improve the quality of solution.
In this paper, we address the problem of autonomous multi-robot mapping, exploration and navigation in unknown, GPS-denied indoor or urban environments using a swarm of robots equipped with directional sensors with limited sensing capabilities and limited computational resources. The robots have no a priori knowledge of the environment and need to rapidly explore and construct a map in a distributed manner using existing landmarks, the presence of which can be detected using onboard senors, although little to no metric information (distance or bearing to the landmarks) is available. In order to correctly and effectively achieve this, the presence of a necessary density/distribution of landmarks is ensured by design of the urban/indoor environment. We thus address this problem in two phases: 1) During the design/construction of the urban/indoor environment we can ensure that sufficient landmarks are placed within the environment. To that end we develop a filtration-based approach for designing strategic placement of landmarks in an environment. 2) We develop a distributed algorithm using which a team of robots, with no a priori knowledge of the environment, can explore such an environment, construct a topological map requiring no metric/distance information, and use that map to navigate within the environment. This is achieved using a topological representation of the environment (called a Landmark Complex), instead of constructing a complete metric/pixel map. The representation is built by the robot as well as used by them for navigation through a balance between exploration and exploitation. We use tools from homology theory for identifying holes in the coverage/exploration of the unknown environment and hence guiding the robots towards achieving a complete exploration and mapping of the environment.
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