Autonomous Robots最新文献

Effective tracking of unknown clustered targets using a distributed team of mobile robots 使用分布式移动机器人团队有效跟踪未知集群目标

IF 3.7 3区计算机科学

Autonomous Robots Pub Date : 2025-05-24 DOI: 10.1007/s10514-025-10200-z

Jun Chen, Philip Dames, Shinkyu Park

{"title":"Effective tracking of unknown clustered targets using a distributed team of mobile robots","authors":"Jun Chen, Philip Dames, Shinkyu Park","doi":"10.1007/s10514-025-10200-z","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10514-025-10200-z","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Distributed multi-target tracking is a canonical task for multi-robot systems, encompassing applications from environmental monitoring to disaster response to surveillance. In many situations the unknown distribution of the targets in a search area is non-uniform, e.g., herds of animals moving together. This paper develops a novel distributed multi-robot multi-target tracking algorithm to effectively search for and track clustered targets. There are two key features. First, there are two parallel estimators, one to provide the best guess of the current states of targets and a second to provide a coarse, long-term distribution of clusters. Second, robots use the power diagram to divide the search space between agents in a way that effectively trades off between tracking detected targets within high density areas and searching for other potential targets. Extensive simulation experiments demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method and show that it outperforms other approaches in tracking accuracy of clustered targets while maintain good performance for uniformly distributed targets.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55409,"journal":{"name":"Autonomous Robots","volume":"49 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10514-025-10200-z.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144131723","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

LSF-planner: a visual local planner for legged robots based on ground structure and feature information LSF-planner：基于地面结构和特征信息的有腿机器人视觉局部规划器

IF 3.7 3区计算机科学

Autonomous Robots Pub Date : 2025-05-12 DOI: 10.1007/s10514-025-10195-7

Teng Zhang, Xiangji Wang, Fusheng Zha, Fucheng Liu

{"title":"LSF-planner: a visual local planner for legged robots based on ground structure and feature information","authors":"Teng Zhang, Xiangji Wang, Fusheng Zha, Fucheng Liu","doi":"10.1007/s10514-025-10195-7","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10514-025-10195-7","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Three-dimensional navigation of legged robots is crucial for field exploration and post-disaster rescue. Existing optimization-based local trajectory planners predominantly focus on obstacle avoidance, neglecting negative obstacles (e.g., pits) and varying ground features (e.g., different terrain types). Additionally, non-overlapping areas between the planned space in three-dimensional trajectory planning and the robot’s actual reachable space lead to decision-making issues between crossing and obstacle avoidance, making it challenging to differentiate between passable and hazardous areas, thus impacting navigation safety and stability. To address these limitations, we propose a novel visual local planner, LSF-Planner (Visual Local Planner for Legged Robots Based on Ground Structure and Feature Information). The LSF-Planner employs a multi-layer local perception map that integrates ground feature semantics, sensor range, and negative obstacles (e.g., voids detected by depth sensors) to construct a ground reliability representation. The Label2Grad method is introduced to convert this representation into gradient layers, incorporating a ground reliability penalty function into trajectory optimization. By incorporating constraints on the center of mass height and crossing angles, LSF-Planner effectively differentiates between traversable and hazardous areas. Experimental results show that LSF-Planner significantly outperforms existing methods in 3D trajectory planning, enhancing the navigation performance of legged robots in unstructured environments.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55409,"journal":{"name":"Autonomous Robots","volume":"49 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143938522","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Shortest coordinated motions for square robots 方形机器人的最短协调运动

IF 3.7 3区计算机科学

Autonomous Robots Pub Date : 2025-05-08 DOI: 10.1007/s10514-025-10198-4

Guillermo Esteban, Dan Halperin, Rodrigo I. Silveira

引用次数: 0

FIMD: fast isolated marker detection for UV-based visual relative localisation in agile UAV swarms FIMD：敏捷无人机群中基于uv的视觉相对定位快速隔离标记检测

IF 3.7 3区计算机科学

Autonomous Robots Pub Date : 2025-05-06 DOI: 10.1007/s10514-025-10197-5

Vojtěch Vrba, Viktor Walter, Petr Štěpán, Martin Saska

{"title":"FIMD: fast isolated marker detection for UV-based visual relative localisation in agile UAV swarms","authors":"Vojtěch Vrba, Viktor Walter, Petr Štěpán, Martin Saska","doi":"10.1007/s10514-025-10197-5","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10514-025-10197-5","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>A novel approach for the fast onboard detection of isolated markers for visual relative localisation of multiple teammates in agile UAV swarms is introduced in this paper. As the detection forms a key component of real-time localisation systems, a three-fold innovation is presented, consisting of an optimised procedure for CPUs, a GPU shader program, and a functionally equivalent FPGA streaming architecture. For the proposed CPU and GPU solutions, the mean processing time per pixel of input camera frames was accelerated by two to three orders of magnitude compared to the unoptimised state-of-the-art approach. For the localisation task, the proposed FPGA architecture offered the most significant overall acceleration by minimising the total delay from camera exposure to detection results. Additionally, the proposed solutions were evaluated on various 32-bit and 64-bit embedded platforms to demonstrate their efficiency, as well as their feasibility for applications using low-end UAVs and MAVs. Thus, it has become a crucial enabling technology for agile UAV swarming.\u0000</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55409,"journal":{"name":"Autonomous Robots","volume":"49 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10514-025-10197-5.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143913840","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Deadlock-free, safe, and decentralized multi-robot navigation in social mini-games via discrete-time control barrier functions 无死锁，安全，分散的多机器人导航在社交小游戏通过离散时间控制障碍功能

IF 3.7 3区计算机科学

Autonomous Robots Pub Date : 2025-04-20 DOI: 10.1007/s10514-025-10194-8

Rohan Chandra, Vrushabh Zinage, Efstathios Bakolas, Peter Stone, Joydeep Biswas

{"title":"Deadlock-free, safe, and decentralized multi-robot navigation in social mini-games via discrete-time control barrier functions","authors":"Rohan Chandra, Vrushabh Zinage, Efstathios Bakolas, Peter Stone, Joydeep Biswas","doi":"10.1007/s10514-025-10194-8","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10514-025-10194-8","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>We present an approach to ensure safe and deadlock-free navigation for decentralized multi-robot systems operating in constrained environments, including doorways and intersections. Although many solutions have been proposed that ensure safety and resolve deadlocks, optimally preventing deadlocks in a minimally invasive and decentralized fashion remains an open problem. We first formalize the objective as a non-cooperative, non-communicative, partially observable multi-robot navigation problem in constrained spaces with multiple conflicting agents, which we term as social mini-games. Formally, we solve a discrete-time optimal receding horizon control problem leveraging control barrier functions for safe long-horizon planning. Our approach to ensuring liveness rests on the insight that <i>there exists barrier certificates that allow each robot to preemptively perturb their state in a minimally-invasive fashion onto liveness sets i.e. states where robots are deadlock-free</i>. We evaluate our approach in simulation as well on physical robots using F1/10 robots, a Clearpath Jackal, as well as a Boston Dynamics Spot in a doorway, hallway, and corridor intersection scenario. Compared to both fully decentralized and centralized approaches with and without deadlock resolution capabilities, we demonstrate that our approach results in safer, more efficient, and smoother navigation, based on a comprehensive set of metrics including success rate, collision rate, stop time, change in velocity, path deviation, time-to-goal, and flow rate.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55409,"journal":{"name":"Autonomous Robots","volume":"49 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10514-025-10194-8.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143850939","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Fault-tolerant multi-robot localization: diagnostic decision-making with information theory and learning models 多机器人容错定位：利用信息论和学习模型进行诊断决策

IF 3.7 3区计算机科学

Autonomous Robots Pub Date : 2025-04-17 DOI: 10.1007/s10514-025-10196-6

Zaynab El Mawas, Cindy Cappelle, Maan El Badaoui El Najjar

引用次数: 0

Human2bot: learning zero-shot reward functions for robotic manipulation from human demonstrations Human2bot：从人类演示中学习机器人操作的零射击奖励函数

IF 3.7 3区计算机科学

Autonomous Robots Pub Date : 2025-04-15 DOI: 10.1007/s10514-025-10193-9

Yasir Salam, Yinbei Li, Jonas Herzog, Jiaqiang Yang

{"title":"Human2bot: learning zero-shot reward functions for robotic manipulation from human demonstrations","authors":"Yasir Salam, Yinbei Li, Jonas Herzog, Jiaqiang Yang","doi":"10.1007/s10514-025-10193-9","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10514-025-10193-9","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Developing effective reward functions is crucial for robot learning, as they guide behavior and facilitate adaptation to human-like tasks. We present Human2Bot (H2B), advancing the learning of such a generalized multi-task reward function that can be used zero-shot to execute unknown tasks in unseen environments. H2B is a newly designed task similarity estimation model that is trained on a large dataset of human videos. The model determines whether two videos from different environments represent the same task. At test time, the model serves as a reward function, evaluating how closely a robot’s execution matches the human demonstration. While previous approaches necessitate robot-specific data to learn reward functions or policies, our method can learn without any robot datasets. To achieve generalization in robotic environments, we incorporate a domain augmentation process that generates synthetic videos with varied visual appearances resembling simulation environments, alongside a multi-scale inter-frame attention mechanism that aligns human and robot task understanding. Finally, H2B is integrated with Visual Model Predictive Control (VMPC) to perform manipulation tasks in simulation and on the xARM6 robot in real-world settings. Our approach outperforms previous methods in simulated and real-world environments trained solely on human data, eliminating the need for privileged robot datasets.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55409,"journal":{"name":"Autonomous Robots","volume":"49 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143835536","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Between reality and delusion: challenges of applying large language models to companion robots for open-domain dialogues with older adults 现实与错觉之间：将大型语言模型应用于陪伴机器人与老年人进行开放域对话的挑战

IF 3.7 3区计算机科学

Autonomous Robots Pub Date : 2025-03-10 DOI: 10.1007/s10514-025-10190-y

Bahar Irfan, Sanna Kuoppamäki, Aida Hosseini, Gabriel Skantze

{"title":"Between reality and delusion: challenges of applying large language models to companion robots for open-domain dialogues with older adults","authors":"Bahar Irfan, Sanna Kuoppamäki, Aida Hosseini, Gabriel Skantze","doi":"10.1007/s10514-025-10190-y","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10514-025-10190-y","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Throughout our lives, we interact daily in conversations with our friends and family, covering a wide range of topics, known as open-domain dialogue. As we age, these interactions may diminish due to changes in social and personal relationships, leading to loneliness in older adults. Conversational companion robots can alleviate this issue by providing daily social support. Large language models (LLMs) offer flexibility for enabling open-domain dialogue in these robots. However, LLMs are typically trained and evaluated on textual data, while robots introduce additional complexity through multi-modal interactions, which has not been explored in prior studies. Moreover, it is crucial to involve older adults in the development of robots to ensure alignment with their needs and expectations. Correspondingly, using iterative participatory design approaches, this paper exposes the challenges of integrating LLMs into conversational robots, deriving from 34 Swedish-speaking older adults’ (one-to-one) interactions with a personalized companion robot, built on Furhat robot with GPT<span>(-)</span>3.5. These challenges encompass disruptions in conversations, including frequent interruptions, slow, repetitive, superficial, incoherent, and disengaging responses, language barriers, hallucinations, and outdated information, leading to frustration, confusion, and worry among older adults. Drawing on insights from these challenges, we offer recommendations to enhance the integration of LLMs into conversational robots, encompassing both general suggestions and those tailored to companion robots for older adults.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55409,"journal":{"name":"Autonomous Robots","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10514-025-10190-y.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143580973","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

ASAP-MPC: an asynchronous update scheme for online motion planning with nonlinear model predictive control asp - mpc：一种非线性模型预测控制在线运动规划的异步更新方案

IF 3.7 3区计算机科学

Autonomous Robots Pub Date : 2025-03-07 DOI: 10.1007/s10514-025-10192-w

Dries Dirckx, Mathias Bos, Bastiaan Vandewal, Lander Vanroye, Jan Swevers, Wilm Decré

{"title":"ASAP-MPC: an asynchronous update scheme for online motion planning with nonlinear model predictive control","authors":"Dries Dirckx, Mathias Bos, Bastiaan Vandewal, Lander Vanroye, Jan Swevers, Wilm Decré","doi":"10.1007/s10514-025-10192-w","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10514-025-10192-w","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This paper presents a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) update scheme targeted at motion planning for mechatronic motion systems, such as drones and mobile platforms. NMPC-based motion planning typically requires low computation times to be able to provide control inputs at the required rate for system stability, disturbance rejection, and overall performance. To achieve online NMPC updates in complex situations, works in literature typically rely on one of two approaches: attempting to reduce the solution times in NMPC by sacrificing feasibility guarantees, or allowing more time to the motion planning algorithm, which requires additional strategies to ensure robust tracking of the planned motion, e.g., state feedback. Following this second paradigm, this paper presents As-Soon-As-Possible MPC (ASAP-MPC), an asynchronous update scheme for online motion planning with optimal control that abandons the idea of having to satisfy restrictive real-time update rates and that solves the optimal control problem to full convergence. ASAP-MPC combines trajectory generation through optimal control with additional tracking control for improved robustness against disturbances and plant-model mismatch. The scheme seamlessly connects trajectories, resulting from subsequent NMPC solutions, providing a smooth and continuous overall trajectory for the motion system. This framework’s applicability to embedded applications is shown on two different experiment setups where a state-of-the-art method fails to successfully navigate through a given environment: a quadcopter flying through a cluttered environment with hardware-in-the-loop simulation and a scale model truck-trailer manoeuvring in a structured physical lab environment.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55409,"journal":{"name":"Autonomous Robots","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143571145","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Isolated Kalman filtering: theory and decoupled estimator design 孤立卡尔曼滤波：理论与解耦估计器设计

IF 3.7 3区计算机科学

Autonomous Robots Pub Date : 2025-02-13 DOI: 10.1007/s10514-025-10191-x

Roland Jung, Lukas Luft, Stephan Weiss

{"title":"Isolated Kalman filtering: theory and decoupled estimator design","authors":"Roland Jung, Lukas Luft, Stephan Weiss","doi":"10.1007/s10514-025-10191-x","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10514-025-10191-x","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>In this paper, we propose a state decoupling strategy for Kalman filtering problems, when the dynamics of individual estimates are decoupled and their outputs are sparsely coupled. The algorithm is termed Isolated Kalman Filtering (IsoKF) and exploits the sparsity in the output coupling by applying approximations that mitigate the need for non-involved estimates. We prove that the approximations made during the isolated coupling of estimates are based on an implicit maximum determinant completion of the incomplete a priori covariance matrix. The steady state behavior is studied on eleven different observation graphs and a buffering scheme to support delayed (i.e. out-of-order) measurements is proposed. We discussed handling of delayed measurements in both, an optimal or a suboptimal way. The credibility of the isolated estimates are evaluated on a linear and nonlinear toy example in Monte Carlo simulations. The presented paradigm is made available online to the community within a generic C++ estimation framework supporting both, modular sensor fusion and collaborative state estimation.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55409,"journal":{"name":"Autonomous Robots","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10514-025-10191-x.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143396553","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0