Peter Stone's Selected Publications

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On Coordination in Practical Multi-Robot Patrol

On Coordination in Practical Multi-Robot Patrol.
Noa Agmon, Chien-Liang Fok, Yehuda Emaliah, Peter Stone, Christine Julien, and Sriram Vishwanath.
In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2012.

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Abstract

Multi-robot patrol is a fundamental application of multi-robot systems. While much theoretical work exists providing an understanding of the optimal patrol strategy for teams of coordinated homogeneous robots, little work exists on building and evaluating the performance of such systems for real. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of multi-robot patrol in a practical outdoor distributed robotic system, and evaluate the effect of different coordination schemes on the performance of the robotic team. The multi-robot patrol algorithms evaluated vary in the level of robot coordination: no coordination, loose coordination, and tight coordination. In addition, we evaluate versions of these algorithms that distribute state information—either individual state, or entire team state (global-view state). Our experiments show that while tight coordination is theoretically optimal, it is not practical in practice. Instead, uncoordinated patrol performs best in terms of average waypoint visitation frequency, though loosely coordinated patrol that shares only individual state performed best in terms of worst-case frequency. Both are significantly better than a loosely coordinated algorithm based on sharing global-view state. We respond to this discrepancy between theory and practice, caused primarily by robot heterogeneity, by extending the theory to account for such heterogeneity, and find that the new theory accounts for the empirical results.

BibTeX Entry

@InProceedings{ICRA12-agmon,
	author="Noa Agmon and Chien-Liang Fok and Yehuda Emaliah and Peter Stone and Christine Julien and Sriram Vishwanath",
	title="On Coordination in Practical Multi-Robot Patrol",
	booktitle = "{IEEE} International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)",
	location = "St Paul, Minnesota",
	month = "May",
	year = "2012",
	abstract = "Multi-robot patrol is a fundamental application
	of multi-robot systems. While much theoretical work exists
	providing an understanding of the optimal patrol strategy for
	teams of coordinated homogeneous robots, little work exists
	on building and evaluating the performance of such systems
	for real. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of multi-robot 
	patrol in a practical outdoor distributed robotic system,
	and evaluate the effect of different coordination schemes on
	the performance of the robotic team. The multi-robot patrol
	algorithms evaluated vary in the level of robot coordination:
	no coordination, loose coordination, and tight coordination.
	In addition, we evaluate versions of these algorithms that
	distribute state information—either individual state, or entire
	team state (global-view state). Our experiments show that while
	tight coordination is theoretically optimal, it is not practical
	in practice. Instead, uncoordinated patrol performs best in
	terms of average waypoint visitation frequency, though loosely
	coordinated patrol that shares only individual state performed
	best in terms of worst-case frequency. Both are significantly
	better than a loosely coordinated algorithm based on sharing
	global-view state. We respond to this discrepancy between
	theory and practice, caused primarily by robot heterogeneity,
	by extending the theory to account for such heterogeneity, and
	find that the new theory accounts for the empirical results."
}

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