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Hitchhiking Robots: A Collaborative Approach for Efficient Multi-Robot Navigation in Indoor Environments

Hitchhiking is a means of transportation gained by asking other people for a (free) ride. We developed a multi-robot system which is the first of its kind to incorporate hitchhiking in robotics, and discuss its advantages. Our method allows the hitchhiker robot to skip redundant computations in navi...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Ravankar, Abhijeet, Ravankar, Ankit A., Kobayashi, Yukinori, Emaru, Takanori
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5579880/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28809803
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s17081878
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author Ravankar, Abhijeet
Ravankar, Ankit A.
Kobayashi, Yukinori
Emaru, Takanori
author_facet Ravankar, Abhijeet
Ravankar, Ankit A.
Kobayashi, Yukinori
Emaru, Takanori
author_sort Ravankar, Abhijeet
collection PubMed
description Hitchhiking is a means of transportation gained by asking other people for a (free) ride. We developed a multi-robot system which is the first of its kind to incorporate hitchhiking in robotics, and discuss its advantages. Our method allows the hitchhiker robot to skip redundant computations in navigation like path planning, localization, obstacle avoidance, and map update by completely relying on the driver robot. This allows the hitchhiker robot, which performs only visual servoing, to save computation while navigating on the common path with the driver robot. The driver robot, in the proposed system performs all the heavy computations in navigation and updates the hitchhiker about the current localized positions and new obstacle positions in the map. The proposed system is robust to recover from ‘driver-lost’ scenario which occurs due to visual servoing failure. We demonstrate robot hitchhiking in real environments considering factors like service-time and task priority with different start and goal configurations of the driver and hitchhiker robots. We also discuss the admissible characteristics of the hitchhiker, when hitchhiking should be allowed and when not, through experimental results.
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spelling pubmed-55798802017-09-06 Hitchhiking Robots: A Collaborative Approach for Efficient Multi-Robot Navigation in Indoor Environments Ravankar, Abhijeet Ravankar, Ankit A. Kobayashi, Yukinori Emaru, Takanori Sensors (Basel) Article Hitchhiking is a means of transportation gained by asking other people for a (free) ride. We developed a multi-robot system which is the first of its kind to incorporate hitchhiking in robotics, and discuss its advantages. Our method allows the hitchhiker robot to skip redundant computations in navigation like path planning, localization, obstacle avoidance, and map update by completely relying on the driver robot. This allows the hitchhiker robot, which performs only visual servoing, to save computation while navigating on the common path with the driver robot. The driver robot, in the proposed system performs all the heavy computations in navigation and updates the hitchhiker about the current localized positions and new obstacle positions in the map. The proposed system is robust to recover from ‘driver-lost’ scenario which occurs due to visual servoing failure. We demonstrate robot hitchhiking in real environments considering factors like service-time and task priority with different start and goal configurations of the driver and hitchhiker robots. We also discuss the admissible characteristics of the hitchhiker, when hitchhiking should be allowed and when not, through experimental results. MDPI 2017-08-15 /pmc/articles/PMC5579880/ /pubmed/28809803 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s17081878 Text en © 2017 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Ravankar, Abhijeet
Ravankar, Ankit A.
Kobayashi, Yukinori
Emaru, Takanori
Hitchhiking Robots: A Collaborative Approach for Efficient Multi-Robot Navigation in Indoor Environments
title Hitchhiking Robots: A Collaborative Approach for Efficient Multi-Robot Navigation in Indoor Environments
title_full Hitchhiking Robots: A Collaborative Approach for Efficient Multi-Robot Navigation in Indoor Environments
title_fullStr Hitchhiking Robots: A Collaborative Approach for Efficient Multi-Robot Navigation in Indoor Environments
title_full_unstemmed Hitchhiking Robots: A Collaborative Approach for Efficient Multi-Robot Navigation in Indoor Environments
title_short Hitchhiking Robots: A Collaborative Approach for Efficient Multi-Robot Navigation in Indoor Environments
title_sort hitchhiking robots: a collaborative approach for efficient multi-robot navigation in indoor environments
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5579880/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28809803
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s17081878
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