Approximate Representations for Multi-Robot Control Policies that Maximize Mutual Information
Benjamin Charrow, Vijay Kumar, Nathan Michael

Citation
Benjamin Charrow, Vijay Kumar, Nathan Michael. "Approximate Representations for Multi-Robot Control Policies that Maximize Mutual Information". Talk or presentation, 5, November, 2013; Poster presented at the 2013 TerraSwarm Annual Meeting. .

Abstract
We address the problem of controlling a small team of robots to estimate the location of mobile and static targets using non-linear range-only sensors. Our control law maximizes the mutual information between the team's estimate and future measurements over a finite time horizon. Because the computations associated with such policies scale poorly with the number of robots, the time horizon associated with the policy, and typical non-parametric representations of the belief, we design approximate representations that enable real-time operation. The main contributions of this work include the control policy, an algorithm for approximating the belief state, and an extensive study of the performance of these algorithms using simulations and real world experiments in complex, indoor environments.

Electronic downloads

Internal. This publication has been marked by the author for TerraSwarm-only distribution, so electronic downloads are not available without logging in.

Citation formats

• HTML

  Benjamin Charrow, Vijay Kumar, Nathan Michael. <a
  href="http://www.terraswarm.org/pubs/205.html"><i>Approximate
  Representations for Multi-Robot Control Policies that
  Maximize Mutual Information</i></a>, Talk or
  presentation,  5, November, 2013; Poster presented at the
  <a
  href="http://www.terraswarm.org/conferences/13/annual"
  >2013 TerraSwarm Annual Meeting</a>.
  .

• Plain text

  Benjamin Charrow, Vijay Kumar, Nathan Michael.
  "Approximate Representations for Multi-Robot Control
  Policies that Maximize Mutual Information". Talk or
  presentation,  5, November, 2013; Poster presented at the
  <a
  href="http://www.terraswarm.org/conferences/13/annual"
  >2013 TerraSwarm Annual Meeting</a>.
  .

• BibTeX

  @presentation{CharrowKumarMichael13_ApproximateRepresentationsForMultiRobotControlPolicies,
      author = {Benjamin Charrow and Vijay Kumar and Nathan Michael},
      title = {Approximate Representations for Multi-Robot
                Control Policies that Maximize Mutual Information},
      day = {5},
      month = {November},
      year = {2013},
      note = {Poster presented at the <a
                href="http://www.terraswarm.org/conferences/13/annual"
                >2013 TerraSwarm Annual Meeting</a>.
  },
      abstract = {We address the problem of controlling a small team
                of robots to estimate the location of mobile and
                static targets using non-linear range-only
                sensors. Our control law maximizes the mutual
                information between the team's estimate and future
                measurements over a finite time horizon. Because
                the computations associated with such policies
                scale poorly with the number of robots, the time
                horizon associated with the policy, and typical
                non-parametric representations of the belief, we
                design approximate representations that enable
                real-time operation. The main contributions of
                this work include the control policy, an algorithm
                for approximating the belief state, and an
                extensive study of the performance of these
                algorithms using simulations and real world
                experiments in complex, indoor environments. 	 },
      URL = {http://terraswarm.org/pubs/205.html}
  }
  

Posted by Benjamin Charrow on 13 Nov 2013.