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Environment Characterization for Non-recontaminating Frontier-Based Robotic Exploration

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Agents in Principle, Agents in Practice (PRIMA 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 7047))

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of obtaining a concise description of a physical environment for robotic exploration. We aim to determine the number of robots required to clear an environment using non-recontaminating exploration. We introduce the medial axis as a configuration space and derive a mathematical representation of a continuous environment that captures its underlying topology and geometry. We show that this representation provides a concise description of arbitrary environments, and that reasoning about points in this representation is equivalent to reasoning about robots in physical space. We leverage this to derive a lower bound on the number of required pursuers. We provide a transformation from this continuous representation into a symbolic representation. Finally, we present a generalized pursuit-evasion algorithm. Given an environment we can compute how many pursuers we need, and generate an optimal pursuit strategy that will guarantee the evaders are detected with the minimum number of pursuers.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA

    Mikhail Volkov, Alejandro Cornejo, Nancy Lynch & Daniela Rus

Authors
  1. Mikhail Volkov
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  2. Alejandro Cornejo
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  3. Nancy Lynch
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  4. Daniela Rus
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social Informatics, Engineering, Kyoto University, Building 10, 6006-8501, Kyoto, Japan

    David Kinny

  2. Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, 1 Roosevelt Road, 106, Taipei, Taiwan

    Jane Yung-jen Hsu

  3. Queensland Research Lab, NICTA, Australia

    Guido Governatori

  4. Decision Systems Lab School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, University of Wollongong, 2522, NSW, Australia

    Aditya K. Ghose

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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Volkov, M., Cornejo, A., Lynch, N., Rus, D. (2011). Environment Characterization for Non-recontaminating Frontier-Based Robotic Exploration. In: Kinny, D., Hsu, J.Yj., Governatori, G., Ghose, A.K. (eds) Agents in Principle, Agents in Practice. PRIMA 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7047. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25044-6_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25044-6_5

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-25043-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-25044-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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