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    Item type:Publication, Access status: with files ,
    Learning environmental field exploration with computationally constrained underwater robots : Gaussian processes meet stochastic optimal control
    (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI), 2019-05-06) ; ; ;
    Autonomous exploration of environmental fields is one of the most promising tasks to be performed by fleets of mobile underwater robots. The goal is to maximize the information gain during the exploration process by integrating an information-metric into the path-planning and control step. Therefore, the system maintains an internal belief representation of the environmental field which incorporates previously collected measurements from the real field. In contrast to surface robots, mobile underwater systems are forced to run all computations on-board due to the limited communication bandwidth in underwater domains. Thus, reducing the computational cost of field exploration algorithms constitutes a key challenge for in-field implementations on micro underwater robot teams. In this work, we present a computationally efficient exploration algorithm which utilizes field belief models based on Gaussian Processes, such as Gaussian Markov random fields or Kalman regression, to enable field estimation with constant computational cost over time. We extend the belief models by the use of weighted shape functions to directly incorporate spatially continuous field observations. The developed belief models function as information-theoretic value functions to enable path planning through stochastic optimal control with path integrals. We demonstrate the efficiency of our exploration algorithm in a series of simulations including the case of a stationary spatio-temporal field.
    Publicationtype: Journal Article
    Scopus© Citations 13  445  401
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    Item type:Publication,
    Low-cost monocular localization with active markers for micro autonomous underwater vehicles
    We present an approach for estimating the absolute poses of a swarm Micro Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (μAUVs) by decomposing the problem into few absolute position estimations and many relative pose estimations. As power constraints are critical to small mobile robots, we develop an extension of active marker pose estimation using color information to solve the marker correspondence problem, and show that this approach is more energy efficient than reflective estimation approaches. We show the feasibility of this approach by localizing a robot navigating in an underwater test tank environment. Detailed analysis is presented characterizing the noise and error properties when estimating robot poses from fixed on-board markers. Moreover, we provide comparisons in power and computational cost for other popular methods of underwater localization.
    Publicationtype: Conference Paper
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