26367203
Control of a single robot in a decentralized multi-robot system
In a decentralized multi-robot system, each robot is controlled by an independent controller and the information obtained by each robot through its proprioceptive sensing devices is not shared with other robots. If the coordination of multiple robots in a cooperative manipulation task is to be accomplished, each robot must be able to exhibit controlled interaction with other robots and objects with minimal information. In this paper, the authors address the problem of maintaining rolling contact between a robot arm and an external, moving object. The authors assume that a nominal model of the motion of the moving object is available. The dynamic system that characterizes the motion of the robot arm and the moving object is acatastatic and nonholonomic. The authors design a nonlinear feedback for such a system that successfully maintains rolling contact. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the system.<<ETX>>
15738427
A potential field based approach to multi-robot manipulation
We describe a framework for controlling and coordinating a group of robots for cooperative manipulation tasks. The framework enables a decentralized approach to planning and control. It allows the robots to approach the object, organize themselves into a formation that will trap the object, and then transport the object to the desired destination. Our controllers and planners are derived from simple potential fields and the hierarchical composition of potential fields. We show how these potential field based controllers and planners benefit complex group interactions, specifically for manipulating and transporting objects in the plane. Theoretically, we show how we can derive results on formation stability with potential field based controllers in many cases. Simulation results demonstrate successful application to a wide range of examples without showing sensitivity to parameters. Because the framework is decentralized at both trajectory generation level and the estimation and control agent level, our framework can potentially scale to groups of tens and hundreds of robots.
5542960
Metrics for analysis and optimization of grasps and fixtures
We develop two quality measures for the analysis and optimization of grasps and fixtures. The first metric is a measure of stability and is obtained by analyzing the effect of small perturbations in the position of the grasped object or small disturbance forces on the grasped object The second metric is a measure of robustness to errors in the positions of the fixture elements. In addition, we explore the effect that the stiffness of the fixture elements has on these two quality measures and propose a design optimization approach to maximize stability and robustness to errors.
6879835
Calibrating an air-ground control system from motion correspondences
In this paper we consider the problem of controlling the motion of a vehicle moving on a ground plane based on aerial imagery. In the course of this work we propose a novel analysis of the relationship between the velocity of the vehicle on the ground plane and the velocity of its projection in the image. We show that this relationship provides information about a subset of the parameters of the homography relating the ground plane to the aerial image plane and describe how we can recover this relationship from available measurements.
29516211
Control of Contact Interactions with Acatastatic Nonholonomic Constraints
A robot arm performs many tasks by interacting with objects or other robots in the environment. It is important for the robot arm to be able to exhibit controlled interactions with the objects and other robots. The contact motion between the robot arm and an object can be rolling, sliding, or separation. In this article, we address the problem of maintaining rolling contact between the robot arm and an external moving object. We assume that a nominal model of the motion of the moving object is available. The dynamic system that characterizes the motion of the robot arm and the moving object in this case is acatastatic and nonholonomic. We have designed a nonlinear feedback for the control of such a system that successfully maintains rolling contact. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the system.
7023425
A Paradigm for Dynamic Coordination of Multiple Robots
In this paper, we present a paradigm for coordinating multiple robots in the execution of cooperative tasks. The basic idea in the paper is to assign to each robot in the team, a role that determines its actions during the cooperation. The robots dynamically assume and exchange roles in a synchronized manner in order to perform the task successfully, adapting to unexpected events in the environment. We model this mechanism using a hybrid systems framework and apply it in different cooperative tasks: cooperative manipulation and cooperative search and transportation. Simulations and real experiments demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed paradigm are presented.
15030712
Impact of mobility on transaction management
We examine the impact of mobility on three different options to managing mobile transactions. Using an analytic performance study we show that no one management approach is always the best and that the performance is impacted by the location management strategy used. The primary objective of this work is to illustrate that the underlying implementation strategies do indeed impact mobile transaction processing and should be considered when proposing mobile transaction processing techniques.
5797236
Strong edge coloring for channel assignment in wireless radio networks
We give efficient sequential and distributed approximation algorithms for strong edge coloring graphs modeling wireless networks. Strong edge coloring is equivalent to computing a conflict-free assignment of channels or frequencies to pairwise links between transceivers in the network
37917309
Management of Concurrency in Interpolation Based Grid File Organization and its Performance
The mathematical structure of the interpolation based grid file organization provides a suitable platform for supporting a high degree of concurrency under a concurrency control mechanism. To demonstrate this capability, we first identified its useful properties for designing a concurrency control mechanism and then developed a deadlock-free two-phase locking based mechanism using dynamic attributes of transactions. To establish the usefulness of our system (concurrency control and the file organization), we measured its performance through simulation modeling. We show that our system handles a number of different types of workloads efficiently and the directory overhead does not strictly depend on the type of workload.
18803353
Performance of Multiversion and Distributed Two-Phase Locking Concurrency Control Mechanisms in Distributed Databases
In this paper, we have presented a detailed simulation study of a distributed multiversion and a distributed two-phase locking concurrency control mechanism (CCM). Our experiment concentrated on measuring the effect of message overhead, read:write ratios, data partitioning, and partial replication on the performance of these mechanisms. The effect of these parameters has not been investigated in any previous work. We simultated a blind-write model for two reasons: (a) all other works studied the behavior of multiversion CCMs under read-before-write model and observed a similar result, and (b) the performance of any multiversion CCM has not been studied under a blind-write model. A blind-write model is not unrealistic, and intutively the multiversion should provide much better performance. We observed that multiversion outperforms wound-wait (WW) in both partitioned and partially replicated databases. Multi version (MV) handles read-only and write-only transactions efficiently, and after a certain write percentage the throughput improves with this percentage. The message overhead progressively becomes less significant as the MPL (multiprogramming level) increases, indicating that in a heavily loaded system the throughput is least sensitive to message cost. We found that in the partially replicated case, 50% write does not show the lowest performance, as observed in the partitioned case.
41766531
High Performance Data Mining
The current decade has seen an explosive growth in database technology and the amount of data collected. This has created an unprecedented opportunity for ”data mining,” which is a process of efficient supervised or unsupervised discovery of interesting information hidden in the data. The focus of this symposium is to bring together experts from the academia and the industry, including reseachers and practitioners, to discuss issues in this important area. Owing to the huge size of data and computation involved in data mining algorithms, parallel processing is often considered an essential component for a successful data mining solution - which will be a special emphasis of the symposium. Talks in this mini-symposium will cover both the current state-of the-practice as well as state-of-the-research in data mining. A highlight of the symposium is a panel discussion on the theory and practice of data mining.