“Optimization of Multi-Robot Systems”

                                                                                      Prof. Dimitri Lefebvre

                                                                              Université Le Havre Normandie, France

                                             Chair: Prof. Dimos Dimarogonas, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden   Room : Sla del Chiostro 

Abstract

In the last years, Multi-Robot Systems (MRS) have experienced considerable recognition due to various possible real-world applications. Multi-Robot Task Allocation (MRTA) is among the most interesting MRS problems. This problem concerns the situation when a set of given tasks must be performed by a team of mobile robots with the intention of optimizing an objective function (e.g., minimizing the mission time). The first objective of this talk is to present MRTA applications, taxonomies, categorizations, and gives a summary of the different optimization techniques proposed by researchers to solve this problem.

 The second objective is to provide an operational and methodological response for the monitoring of industrial areas according to MRS. The aim is to optimize monitoring patrols of automated mobile agents that are responsible for the surveillance. Such agents are formed by automated guided vehicles or unmanned aerial vehicles that carry various sensors. Apart from the specificities of each class of agents, the proposed approach is motivated by the need to inspect sites that may be dangerous or difficult to access.

The optimization of the missions is carried out in compliance with functional (e.g., precedence of the operations) and operational (e.g., the travel time reserve of the agents) constraints in the double perspective of patrol configuration and trajectory planning as far as these aspects are strongly correlated. The questions that should be answered are as follows. How many mobile agents are required to perform a given set of measurements? How many sensors and what types of sensors must each of these agents equip? How to define the mission and trajectory of each agent? Such questions are studied as a multi-robots / multi-tasks problem, and an approach based on the hybrid filtered beam search is proposed for that purpose. The longer-term challenge that is initiated here is to coordinate the means of monitoring and intervention in an automated way by combining predictive and decision-making models, and using model-based methods as well as database-based methods.

Biography of Prof. Dimitri Lefebvre

Dimitri Lefebvre received the S.B. in Science and Engineering in 1990, the M.Eng. degree in Automatic Control and Computer Science in 1992, and the Ph.D. degree Automatic Control and Computer Science in 1994, all from University of Sciences and Technologies and Ecole Centrale in Lille, France. In 1995, he joined the University of Franche Comté, Belfort, France, where he served as Associate Professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Research Group about Systems and Transportations. Since 2001, he has been with University Le Havre Normandie, France as Professor. He is currently with the Research Group on Electrical Engineering and Automatic Control (GREAH) in Le Havre and was from 2007 to 2012 the head of the group. His current research interests include fault diagnosis and control design for dynamic systems, discrete event systems, learning processes and artificial intelligence, with applications to network security and safety in the domains of electrical engineering, robotics, transportations and logistics. He is the authors of more than 100 articles published in indexed journals and more than 200 communications in international conferences.