Papers for

emergency response units

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Robot swarms model spatial fields without external positioning systems

Gaussian Processes for Modelling Spatial Fields with Robot Swarms

Abstract: Robot swarms, by virtue of their decentralised architecture, are a natural tool for scalable, robust modelling of spatial fields, such as water temperature, wind velocity, or terrain elevation. However, existing methods rely on external positioning systems that allow each robot to determine its own position in space. Here, we introduce location-unaware Gaussian process regression (LU-GPR) as a solution to the modelling of spatial fields in the absence of such positioning systems. LU-GPR allows each robot to infer the posterior mean and variance of the field in space, while simultaneously agreeing on a common frame of reference with its peers, using only local sensing and communication. We propose an online algorithm that allows each robot to consistently infer local estimates as its local frame of reference converges to the common one. By means of a product of experts model, each robot also combines the estimates of its peers with its own to obtain a global model. Our results show that LU-GPR scales well with the number of robots and is robust to limited communication ranges. We also demonstrate how it can be used in real-world monitoring scenarios to estimate the flow of an evacuating crowd.

Tue 15 SeptRobotics
The gist
Measuring things like water temperature or wind speed across a large area usually needs robots that know their exact location, often told by GPS. The authors created a method that lets groups of robots work together to map these measurements without needing to know their own positions. Each robot shares information locally and over time they agree on a common reference frame to build an accurate map. This approach works well even when robots can only communicate with nearby neighbors and can be applied to real-world tasks like monitoring crowd movement.
Open 2609.17463v1