Trung Dung Ngo

Sociable Robots through Self-maintained Energy

Research of autonomous mobile robots has mostly emphasized interaction and coordination that are natually inspired from biological behavior of birds, insects, and fish: flocking, foraging, collecting, and sharing. However, most research has been only focused on autonomous behaviors in order to perform robots like animals, whereas it is lacked of determinant to those behaviours: energy. Approaching to clusted amimal and the higher, collective and sharing food among individuals are major activity to keep society being. This paper issues an approach to sociable robots using self-maintained energy in cooperative mobile robots, which is dominantly inspired from swarm behavior of collecting and sharing food of honey-bee and ant. Autonomous mobile robots are usually equipped with a finite energy, thus they can operate in a finite time. To overcome the finitude, we describe practical deployment of mobile robots that are capable of carrying and exchanging fuel to other robots. Mechanism implementation including modular hardware and control architecture to demonstrate the capabicities of the approach is presented. Subsequently, the battery exchange algorithm basically based on probabilistic modeling of total energy on each robot located in its local vicinity is described. The paper is concluded with challenging works of chain of mobile robots, rescue, repair, and relation of heterogeneous robots.

Trophallaxis in robotic swarms - beyond energy autonomy

The paper considers trophallaxis in robot swarms, which is presented as a concept for resource sharing among individuals inspired by altruistic behaviour in natural populations. A number of elementary problems are identified, such as energy containment, robot morphology, rendezvous motion control and individual resource exchange behaviour. The CISSBot is presented as a design study as well as a proof of concept illustrating how a trophallactic exchange mechanism may be implemented based on batteries in commercially available form factor. A collison free proximity motion control is presented and illustrated by numerical simulation results. A probabilistic Markovian model including relevant effects; mobility, charging, battery exchange and energy consumption is presented and illustrated with numerical examples.

Potentially Distributable Energy: Towards Energy Autonomy in Large Population of Mobile Robots

We propose a new concept, potentially distributable energy, in the field of autonomous mobile robots. Considering a system of multiple robots powered by batteries, each robot no longer works since its energy capacity is expired. To extend operating time, the robot needs to replenish energy through recharging energy. To date, except research on vaccum cleaning robots that are able to recharge battery when docking with the fixed station has been achieved, there does not exist any research of energy distribution to prolong operating time in a large population of mobile robots. This could be caused by the lack of using rechargeable battery in the fact that the robot has to normally spend the charging-time much longer than the operating time. This paper presents simulation results of mobile robots that are capable of not only self-recharging energy but also exchanging batteries to the other robots. Initially, we describe a simulation of multiple mobile robots, and then issue rules of battery exchange, which is formulated under constraints of workload, distance and remaining capacity. The simulation shows that: (a) a robot is able to be energetically autonomous if its energy can be replenished by the other robots or it is able to come back to the main charging station to replenish itself; (b) energy of a robot is always under constraints of energy distribution of the mother charging station and the other robots; (c) distributed energy balance is the main elements to decide a number of robots in a specific area and an ideal location of the repository when one wants to deploy a large population of autonomous mobile robots. Finally, based on results of the simulation we adjust rules for our real multirobot system.

Being sociable: Multirobots with self-sustained energy

To date, mobile robots are emerging to target for applications in our life. Most of research focus on autonomous behaviors of mobile robots, instead of considering the determination to make a robot being truly autonomous. To be interested in animal species, e.g ant or bee, an individual has to coordinate with others to keep the society alive. Likewise, as an initial condition, a robot system is truly autonomous if such a system has energy autonomy. Further, to be sociable robots, the robots must have not only behavioural autonomy but energetic autonomy. Thereby, inspired from the nature of animals, this paper aims to present a system of multiple robots with self-sustained energy to achieve energy autonomy. We examine a multirobot system with energy sharing capability based on battery distribution to approach to the scope of sociable robots. First we show simulation results of the potential energy to suggest a scheme for creating sociable robots. Later we perform early real implementation of our robots in the CAD model, hardware, and the control architecture. Finally we describe the initial experimental deployment of the system.

LinkMind: Link Optimization in Swarming Mobile Sensor Networks

A swarming mobile sensor network is comprised of a swarm of wirelessly connected mobile robots equipped with various sensors. Such a network can be applied in an uncertain environment for services such as cooperative navigation and exploration, object identification and information gathering. One of the most advantageous properties of the swarming wireless sensor network is that mobile nodes can work cooperatively to organize an ad-hoc network and optimize the network link capacity to maximize the transmission of gathered data from a source to a target. This paper describes a new method of link optimization of swarming mobile sensor networks. The new method is based on combination of the artificial potential force guaranteeing connectivities of the mobile sensor nodes and the max-flow min-cut theorem of graph theory ensuring optimization of the network link capacity. The developed algorithm is demonstrated and evaluated in simulation.

An Approach to Sociable Robots through Self-distributed Energy

Research of autonomous mobile robots has mostly emphasized interaction and coordination that are naturally inspired from biological behavior of birds, insects, and fish: flocking, foraging, collecting, and sharing. However, most research has been only focused on autonomous behaviors in order to perform robots like animals, whereas it is lacked of determinant to those behaviours: energy. Approaching to cluster animal and the higher, collective and sharing food among individuals are major activity to keep society being. This paper issues an approach to sociable robots using self-maintained energy in cooperative mobile robots, which is dominantly inspired from swarm behavior of collecting and sharing food of honey-bee and ant. Autonomous mobile robots are usually equipped with a finite energy, thus they can operate in a finite time. To overcome the finitude, we describe practical deployment of mobile robots that are capable of carrying and exchanging fuel to other robots. Mechanism implementation including modular hardware and control architecture to demonstrate the capabilities of the approach is presented. Subsequently, the battery exchange algorithm basically based on probabilistic modeling of total energy on each robot located in its local vicinity is described. The paper is concluded with challenging works of chain of mobile robots, rescue, repair, and relation of heterogeneous robots

RGB-D and laser data fusion-based human detection and tracking for socially aware robot navigation framework

This paper proposes an effective socially aware navigation framework for mobile service robots in social environments. The proposed framework consists of three stages. In the first stage, RGB-D and laser data fusion-based human detection and tracking system is utilized to detect humans in the vicinity of the robot. In the second stage of framework, the extended personal space is modelled by using the human states including position and motion, and the relative motion between the human and the robot. In the third stage, the extended personal space is incorporated into the motion planning system and then a kinodynamic RRT motion planner is made use of to generate a legible trajectory of the mobile robot. The experimental results indicate that the proposed framework is able to ensure the safety of human, providing socially acceptable behaviors of the mobile service robot.

Probabilistic Communication Based Potential Force for Robot Formations: A Practical Approach

We introduce a new method of artificial potential forces based on probabilistic communication, called ‘Probabilistic Communication based Potential Forces’- PCPF. The potential forces provides a locally distributed control for a formation of a large volume of self-regulated mobile robots. While models of sensing and communication so fare mostly have been with simple assumptions that are far away from the physical properties of sensors and communication mechanisms, the method here is realistic because both attractive and repulsive forces are only based on probability of communication which are empirically measured and approximately estimated between robots. The method is demonstrated through non-trivial examples of robot formation and formation transformation. Analysis is provided to facilitate understanding of the elements of the probabilistic method.

Sociable Mobile Robots through Self-maintained Energy

Research of sociable robots has emphasized interaction and coordination of mobile robots with inspiration from natural behavior of birds, insects, and fish: flocking, foraging, collecting, sharing and so forth. However, the animal behaviors are looking for food towards survival. In an animal society, collecting and sharing are experimentally recognized as the highest property. This paper issues an approach to sociable robots using self-maintained energy in robot society, which is naturally inspired from swarm behavior of honey-bee and ant. Typically, autonomous mobile robots are usually equipped with a finite energy, thus they can operate in a finite time. To overcome the limitation, we describe practical deployment of a group of mobile robot with the possibility of carrying and exchanging fuel, e.g. battery to other robots. Early implementation that includes modular hardware and control architecture to demonstrate the possibility of the approach is presented. Subsequently, the battery exchange algorithm basically based on probabilistic modeling of total energy on each robot located in local vicinity is described.

Dynamic Social Zone based Mobile Robot Navigation for Human Comfortable Safety in Social Environments

We propose an effective human comfortable safety framework enabling a mobile service robot to navigate safely and socially in social environments. The proposed framework takes human states (position, orientation, motion and hand poses) and social interaction information relative to the robot into account to model extended personal space and social interaction space, respectively, the combination of which results in a dynamic social zone (DSZ). The DSZ-based human comfortable safety framework is able to estimate an approaching goal pose of the robot for a human or a group of humans, thus allowing the robot to not only avoid but also to approach a human or a group of humans in a socially acceptable manner. The DSZ is incorporated into the robots motion planning system comprising the D* planner technique and dynamic window approach algorithm to generate motion control commands for the mobile robot. We verify the effectiveness of the proposed method through simulation and experimental results under the newly proposed human comfortable safety indices.