Searching and tracking people with cooperative mobile robots

Social robots should be able to search and track people in order to help them. In this paper we present two different techniques for coordinated multi-robot teams for searching and tracking people. A probability map (belief) of a target person location is maintained, and to initialize and update it,...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Goldhoorn, Alex, Garrell, Anaís, Alquézar Mancho, Renato, Sanfeliu, Alberto
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión aceptada para publicación
Fecha de publicación:2018
País:España
Institución:Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Repositorio:DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC
OAI Identifier:oai:digital.csic.es:10261/167160
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10261/167160
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Urban robotics
Multi-robot coordination
Decentralized coordination
Search-and-track
Descripción
Sumario:Social robots should be able to search and track people in order to help them. In this paper we present two different techniques for coordinated multi-robot teams for searching and tracking people. A probability map (belief) of a target person location is maintained, and to initialize and update it, two methods were implemented and tested: one based on a reinforcement learning algorithm and the other based on a particle filter. The person is tracked if visible, otherwise an exploration is done by making a balance, for each candidate location, between the belief, the distance, and whether close locations are explored by other robots of the team. The validation of the approach was accomplished throughout an extensive set of simulations using up to five agents and a large amount of dynamic obstacles; furthermore, over three hours of real-life experiments with two robots searching and tracking were recorded and analysed.