Hitchhiking Robots: A Collaborative Approach for Efficient Multi-Robot Navigation in Indoor Environments
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Hitchhiking in Robots
2.1. Hitchhiking Mechanism
2.2. Four Steps of Hitchhiking
- Handshake: The hitchhiker keeps broadcasting requests to a potential driver until a threshold hitchhike wait time . Once a (potential) driver responds, the two robots exchange information. The hitchhiker request comprises of , where, is the ID, is the goal location, and is the profile of the hitchhiking robot. The potential driver robot checks if the length of the common path () traversed during hitchhiking is longer than a threshold distance (). This is graphically shown in Figure 3, in which, and are the start locations, and and are the goal locations of the driver and hitchhiker robots, respectively. The common path between the points and is the hitchhiking distance (). Hitchhiking is allowed if . Hitchhiking is denied for shorter distance (less than ) due to the overhead involved in coupling and decoupling. Moreover, hitchhiking over shorter distances affects the service time. The threshold hitchhiking length () depends on many factors like the dynamics of the environment, and the characteristics of the SLAM algorithm employed. A typical setting involves setting to several meters (ex. ≈20 m). Notice that, from Figure 3, if , hitchhking is allowed even if the nodes and are far from each other. The best case scenario for hitchhking is when and completely overlap. This entire process is called a handshake. If no potential driver is found until time, the hitchhiker navigates towards the goal on its own. A driver with high task priority () will simply ignore any requests from a hitchhiker.
- Coupling: The next step is coupling between the hitchhiker and the driver. Coupling is defined as the process in which the hitchhiker aligns behind the driver robot and the QR-code behind the driver is recognized to initiate visual servoing. The alignment and coupling are only allowed within a threshold time and , respectively. In order to assist coupling, the environment is marked with special pre-defined markers known to all the robots. Certain positions with markers are also reserved to further assist coupling.
- Navigation: Once the robots are coupled, the driver initiates navigation towards the goal. During this time, the hitchhiker shut downs all the processes except visual servoing. In other words, the hitchhiker shuts down the localization, path planning, obstacle avoidance, and map update modules. It simply follows the driver robot using visual servoing. The driver robot executes all the modules.
- Decoupling: Once the two robots have reached the destination, the decoupling process is initiated where visual servoing stops. During decoupling, the driver gives the current position location (i.e., the estimated pose in the map) and the uncertainty associated with it (). This information must be given to the hitchhiker as it requires it as an initial estimate to localize itself in the map to navigate to another location. Moreover, during navigation if the driver robot has updated its map with the location of the new static obstacles (), this information is also transferred to the hitchhiker to update its local map. This ensures that there is no loss of information during navigation for the hitchhiker.
3. Hitchhiking Points
- Loss of Efficiency: Hitchhiking consumes time in alignment and coupling. By allowing hitchhiking anywhere in the map, the robots may not find fixed markers in the environment to assist coupling. In the absence of such markers, coupling is difficult and the robots consume more time. Moreover, the robots must always be alert of an incoming request from a hitchhiker.
- Problem of Obstacles: Since it consumes time for the two robots to align and couple, hitchhiking at an inappropriate place is a hindrance in the pathways for other robots and people.
3.1. When to Hitchhike and When Not
4. Problem of ‘Driver Lost’ Scenario
Algorithm 1: Hitchhiking Pseudocode (Driver Robot) |
Algorithm 2: Hitchhiking Pseudocode (Hitchhiker) |
5. Award Mechanism
6. State of the Art in Robot Localization
6.1. Driver Robot Localization with Extended Kalman Filter
6.2. Pose Transfer during Decoupling
7. Experimental Results
7.1. Motion Model
7.2. Experiments in Which Hitchhiking Was Allowed
7.2.1. Experiment 1
7.2.2. Experiment 2
7.3. Experiments with Denied Hitchhiking
7.4. Transferring Quality Maps to Hitchhiker
8. Discussion
9. Summary
Supplementary Materials
Author Contributions
Conflicts of Interest
Abbreviations
Robot ID of hitchhiker (h)/driver (d) | |
Start location of hitchhiker (h)/driver (d) | |
Goal location of hitchhiker (h)/driver (d) | |
Task priority of hitchhiker (h)/driver (d) | |
Robot profile of hitchhiker (h)/driver (d) | |
Threshold hitchhike wait time | |
Threshold alignment time | |
Threshold coupling time | |
Threshold hitchhiking distance | |
Positional uncertainty of robot | |
New static obstacles | |
Robot Pose | |
SLAM | Simultaneous Localization and Mapping |
EKF | Extended Kalman Filter |
Appendix A
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Obstacles | Experiment 1 | Experiment 2 | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
(x, y) | (Width × Breadth) | (x, y) | (Width × Breadth) | ||
Obstacle 1 | (231, 152) | () | (394, 685) | () | |
Obstacle 2 | (308, 129) | () | (493, 650) | () | |
Obstacle 3 | (376, 150) | () | (632, 698) | () | |
Obstacle 4 | − | − | (795, 646) | () | |
Obstacle 5 | − | − | (931, 682) | () | |
Obstacle 6 | − | − | (1075, 654) | () |
Exp | Obstacles | Time to | Time to | Waiting Time | Delay of | Delay of |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Yes/No | Couple | Decouple | of Hitchhiker | Driver | Hitchhiker | |
Exp 1 | No | 15.00 s | 17.67 s | 19.33 s | 32.67 s | 52.00 s |
Yes | 15.33 s | 22.00 s | 21.67 s | 37.33 s | 59.00 s | |
Exp 2 | No | 33.00 s | 19.00 s | 11.33 s | 52.00 s | 63.33 s |
Yes | 35.00 s | 21.67 s | 10.67 s | 56.67 s | 67.33 s |
Scheme | Robot | PP | OBS | LZN | MAP | COM | VS |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Traditional | R1 | On | On | On | On | On | Off |
R2 | On | On | On | On | On | Off | |
Hitchhiking | R1 | On | On | On | On | On | Off |
R2 | Off | Off | Off | Off | On | On |
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Ravankar, A.; Ravankar, A.A.; Kobayashi, Y.; Emaru, T. Hitchhiking Robots: A Collaborative Approach for Efficient Multi-Robot Navigation in Indoor Environments. Sensors 2017, 17, 1878. https://doi.org/10.3390/s17081878
Ravankar A, Ravankar AA, Kobayashi Y, Emaru T. Hitchhiking Robots: A Collaborative Approach for Efficient Multi-Robot Navigation in Indoor Environments. Sensors. 2017; 17(8):1878. https://doi.org/10.3390/s17081878
Chicago/Turabian StyleRavankar, Abhijeet, Ankit A. Ravankar, Yukinori Kobayashi, and Takanori Emaru. 2017. "Hitchhiking Robots: A Collaborative Approach for Efficient Multi-Robot Navigation in Indoor Environments" Sensors 17, no. 8: 1878. https://doi.org/10.3390/s17081878