[month] [year]

Ayush Datta – Hexagonal Exploration of Areas

Ayush Datta  received his MS Dual Degree in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). His research work was supervised by Prof. Kamal Karlapalem. Here’s a summary of his research work on Hexagonal Exploration of Areas with Multiple Robots:

In this thesis, we propose a distributed, cooperative path planning technique for multiple drones (∼200) to explore an unknown region (∼10,000 connected units) in the presence of obstacles. The map of an unknown region is dynamically created based on the information obtained from sensors and other drones. The unknown region is considered as connected region split up into hexagonal unit regions. We use two types of communication, one long-range, and another more frequently used short-range communication. The short-range communication within drones in smaller proximity helps to avoid obstacles and re-exploration of cells already explored by companion drones located in the same sub-area as proven by the simulation results. The long range communication helps in deciding the next optimal sub-area to be targeted by individual drones based on weighted RNN (Reverse nearest neighbour). We have two types of communication in a weighted hexagonal representation of sub-areas which makes exploration more efficient and scalable. However, given the fact that drones are prone to failures due to a variety of causes, it is important that the strategies developed for these systems be failure resilient. Hence, failure resilience in multi-agent robot systems for area exploration and mapping is a critical aspect. Thus, in the thesis, we will introduce the failures in the simulation scenario and study the impact of failures on the present state of the art algorithms. Moreover, we will also study the present benchmarking metrics and show how the present metrics fail to incorporate the failures that exist in real-world scenarios.