Evaluation of parallel reduction strategies for fusion of sensory information from a robot team

Damian M. Lyons; Joseph Leroy

doi:10.1117/12.2180284

22 May 2015 Evaluation of parallel reduction strategies for fusion of sensory information from a robot team

Damian M. Lyons, Joseph Leroy

Proceedings Volume 9498, Multisensor, Multisource Information Fusion: Architectures, Algorithms, and Applications 2015; 94980D (2015) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2180284
Event: SPIE Sensing Technology + Applications, 2015, Baltimore, MD, United States

Abstract

The advantage of using a team of robots to search or to map an area is that by navigating the robots to different parts of the area, searching or mapping can be completed more quickly. A crucial aspect of the problem is the combination, or fusion, of data from team members to generate an integrated model of the search/mapping area. In prior work we looked at the issue of removing mutual robots views from an integrated point cloud model built from laser and stereo sensors, leading to a cleaner and more accurate model. This paper addresses a further challenge: Even with mutual views removed, the stereo data from a team of robots can quickly swamp a WiFi connection. This paper proposes and evaluates a communication and fusion approach based on the parallel reduction operation, where data is combined in a series of steps of increasing subsets of the team. Eight different strategies for selecting the subsets are evaluated for bandwidth requirements using three robot missions, each carried out with teams of four Pioneer 3-AT robots. Our results indicate that selecting groups to combine based on similar pose but distant location yields the best results.

Citation Download Citation

Damian M. Lyons and Joseph Leroy "Evaluation of parallel reduction strategies for fusion of sensory information from a robot team", Proc. SPIE 9498, Multisensor, Multisource Information Fusion: Architectures, Algorithms, and Applications 2015, 94980D (22 May 2015); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2180284

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