Cooperative prediction of time-varying boundaries with a team of robots
David Saldaña, Renato Assunção, M. Ani Hsieh, Mário F. M. Campos, Vijay Kumar · 2017
Environmental boundaries, such as the borderline of a forest fire or an oil spill, pose a significant threat for living organisms. Anticipating the dynamics of these phenomena is a potentially life-saving indicator to support efficient and effective evacuations or to dispel the hazard. We propose a decentralized coordination method that allows multiple robots to efficiently sample and predict the behavior of environmental boundaries. Our method does not require a priori information about the boundary dynamics. We validate our proposal through experiments with actual robots. We demonstrate experimentally that our method can estimate and predict non-convex boundaries even with noisy measurements and inaccurate motion actuators.