Expedient Coverage in Constricted Environments with Networked Multiple Mobile Robotic Systems
Abstract: This talk will present a series of results concerning the employment of Networked Multiple Mobile Robotic Systems (MMRS) in monitoring and inspection tasks that take place in well-structured but constricted environments. Some typical examples of such environments are water, sewage and other utility networks, mines and pipeline systems.
Due to the constricted nature and the remoteness and of the considered environments, the deployed robots must be effectively controlled to maintain (i) their physical safety and (ii) their communication connectivity with the command-&-control (C&C) center that supervises the entire operation. These requirements are addressed through the imposition of a “zoning” scheme that (a) maintains adequate separation among the traveling robots by restricting the zone occupancy to one robot, and (b) ensures that robots located in neighboring zones can communicate robustly with each other using their wireless communication capabilities. This last requirement further enables the preservation of an ad hoc wireless communication network among the robots and the C&C center by ensuring that each deployed robot is connected to the C&C center through a sequence of zones occupied by robots.
The zoning scheme described in the previous paragraph brings the workflow management problems arising in the target MMRS applications to the class of problems that is known as “Optimal Multi-Robot Path Planning on Graphs (OMRP2G)”. The considered OMRP2G problems are at the frontier of the corresponding literature, since the visitation of a target location requires the deployment of an entire team of robots reaching out to this location, and, at the same time, such deployed teams may share the robots that are located on common segments of the paths that are leading to the target locations. Additional elements contributing to the complexity of these problems are (i) the dynamic (re-)formation of the deployed robotic teams based on the spatial distribution of the target locations and the robot availability, (ii) the management of the “(shifting) bottlenecks” that are defined by the limited capacities of the zones, and (iii) the management of the routing flexibility that is provided by the guidepath network.
The talk will systematically introduce these OMRP2G problems, and it will overview some technical developments that have enabled a profound understanding of their structure and the design of efficient solution methods for them.
Biography: Spyros Reveliotis is a Professor in the School of Industrial & Systems Engineering, at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He holds a Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, an M.Sc. degree in Computer Systems Engineering from Northeastern University, Boston, and a Ph.D. degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Dr. Reveliotis’ research interests are in the areas of modern control theory and operations research, and their applications in the deployment and support of flexible automation.
He is a Fellow of IEEE and a member of INFORMS. He and his students have been the recipients of a number of Best Paper awards, and he has delivered a number of keynote / plenary presentations.
Dr. Reveliotis has served on the editorial boards of many journals and conferences pertaining to his areas of interest. He has also held leading roles in the organization of some of these conferences, and he has been on the Board of Governors of the American Automatic Control Council, representing the INFORMS Applied Probability Society.