Robotics: Science and Systems XIV

Toward Specification-Guided Active Mars Exploration for Cooperative Robot Teams

Petter Nilsson, Sofie Haesaert, Rohan Thakker, Kyohei Otsu, Cristian-Ioan Vasile, Ali Agha, Richard Murray, Aaron Ames

Abstract:

As a step towards achieving autonomy in space exploration missions, we consider a cooperative robotics system consisting of a copter and a rover. The goal of the copter is to explore an unknown environment so as to maximize knowledge about a science mission expressed in linear temporal logic that is to be executed by the rover. We model environmental uncertainty as a belief space Markov decision process and formulate the problem as a two-step stochastic dynamic program that we solve in a way that leverages the decomposed nature of the overall system. We demonstrate in simulations that the robot team makes intelligent decisions in the face of uncertainty.

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Bibtex:

  
@INPROCEEDINGS{Nilsson-RSS-18, 
    AUTHOR    = {Petter Nilsson AND Sofie Haesaert AND Rohan Thakker AND Kyohei Otsu AND Cristian-Ioan Vasile AND Ali Agha AND Richard Murray AND Aaron Ames}, 
    TITLE     = {Toward Specification-Guided Active Mars Exploration for Cooperative Robot Teams}, 
    BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems}, 
    YEAR      = {2018}, 
    ADDRESS   = {Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania}, 
    MONTH     = {June}, 
    DOI       = {10.15607/RSS.2018.XIV.047} 
}