Multi-Robot Coordination Under Uncertainty in Cyclic Long Horizon Tasks
Recent years have shown a growing interest on using multi-robot systems to address a wide range of applications such as logistics, agriculture, transportation and space exploration, where frequently the robot tasks have a cyclic long horizon nature. These are scenarios that require long-term planning and where the robots have to deal with unpredictable environments, and [...]
Distributed Trajectory Generation for Multiple Autonomous Vehicles using Bernstein Polynomial-based Methods
This thesis presents an efficient and reliable trajectory generation framework that enables the computation of feasible, safe and collision-free trajectories for teams of autonomous vehicles while satisfying timing constraints imposed by real-time applications. The proposed framework aims to address a few key issues related to multi-vehicle trajectory generation: (i) Satisfying collision-avoidance constraints at all time [...]
Attitude Determination in Three-Vehicle Constrained Formations
This thesis studies the attitude problem of a three-vehicle constrained formation, where the vehicles measure the relative direction to other elements of the formation and to known inertial references. However, the formation is constrained and, consequently, two of the vehicles cannot measure the relative direction between them. The solution for the attitude problem is first [...]
Robots Meet People: Socially Aware Engagement Behaviours
Engagement during human-robot first encounters is a challenging task that requires both parties to understand each other's intent to interact without mutual information. Engagement may fail due to people's unawareness of the robot's presence and its desire to interact, or because of people's lack of interest in interacting. In this thesis, we pursue answers to [...]
Methodologies for Benchmarking of Robot Tasks and Systems
When the performance of robot functionalities and robot software components is evaluated, functionalities and software components are usually assumed independent from characteristics of the robot system and environment in which they operate. However, these aspects influence the performance, e.g., the performance of a software component implementing a robot functionality depends on the robot system configuration, [...]