Bioinspired Perception and Navigation of Service Robots in Indoor Environments: A Review

Biological principles draw attention to service robotics because of similar concepts when robots operate various tasks. Bioinspired perception is significant for robotic perception, which is inspired by animals' awareness of the environment. This paper reviews the bioinspired perception and navigation of service robots in indoor environments, which are popular applications of civilian robotics. The navigation approaches are classified by perception type, including vision-based, remote sensing, tactile sensor, olfactory, sound-based, inertial, and multimodal navigation. The trend of state-of-art techniques is moving towards multimodal navigation to combine several approaches. The challenges in indoor navigation focus on precise localization and dynamic and complex environments with moving objects and people.

Multi-Robot Coordination Analysis, Taxonomy, Challenges and Future Scope

Recently, Multi-Robot Systems (MRS) have attained considerable recognition because of their efficiency and applicability in different types of real-life applications. This paper provides a comprehensive research study on MRS coordination, starting with the basic terminology, categorization, application domains, and finally, give a summary and insights on the proposed coordination approaches for each application domain. We have done an extensive study on recent contributions in this research area in order to identify the strengths, limitations, and open research issues, and also highlighted the scope for future research. Further, we have examined a series of MRS state-of-the-art parameters that affect MRS coordination and, thus, the efficiency of MRS, like communication mechanism, planning strategy, control architecture, scalability, and decision-making. We have proposed a new taxonomy to classify various coordination approaches of MRS based on the six broad dimensions. We have also analyzed that how coordination can be achieved and improved in two fundamental problems, i.e., multi-robot motion planning, and task planning, and in various application domains of MRS such as exploration, object transport, target tracking, etc.

Recent developments in terrain identification, classification, parameter estimation for the navigation of autonomous robots

The work presents a review on ongoing researches in terrain-related challenges influencing the navigation of Autonomous Robots, specifically Unmanned Ground ones. The paper aims to highlight the recent developments in robot design and advanced computing techniques in terrain identification, classification, parameter estimation, and developing modern control strategies. The objective of our research is to familiarize the gaps and opportunities of the aforementioned areas to the researchers who are passionate to take up research in the field of autonomous robots. The paper brings recent works related to terrain strategies under a single platform focusing on the advancements in planetary rovers, rescue robots, military robots, agricultural robots, etc. Finally, this paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the related works which can bridge the AI techniques and advanced control strategies to improve navigation. The study focuses on various Deep Learning techniques and Fuzzy Logic Systems in detail. The work can be extended to develop new control schemes to improve multiple terrain navigation performance.

Multi-Robot Exploration Based on Multi-Objective Grey Wolf Optimizer

In this paper, we used multi-objective optimization in the exploration of unknown space. Exploration is the process of generating models of environments from sensor data. The goal of the exploration is to create a finite map of indoor space. It is common practice in mobile robotics to consider the exploration as a single-objective problem, which is to maximize a search of uncertainty. In this study, we proposed a new methodology of exploration with two conflicting objectives: to search for a new place and to enhance map accuracy. The proposed multiple-objective exploration uses the Multi-Objective Grey Wolf Optimizer algorithm. It begins with the initialization of the grey wolf population, which are waypoints in our multi-robot exploration. Once the waypoint positions are set in the beginning, they stay unchanged through all iterations. The role of updating the position belongs to the robots, which select the non-dominated waypoints among them. The waypoint selection results from two objective functions. The performance of the multi-objective exploration is presented. The trade-off among objective functions is unveiled by the Pareto-optimal solutions. A comparison with other algorithms is implemented in the end.