Current research into path planning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has placed a major focus on accomplishing the goals of various agents while avoiding collisions between each other. However, there has been little focus on whether the planned trajectories are fair for each agent.
This work provides an answer to...
Mountain search and rescue is a vital form of emergency response to assist people in austere environments (e.g., extreme terrain, poor weather). Volunteer mountain search and rescue teams in the United States have begun adopting consumer- grade unmanned aerial vehicles to assist a variety of tasks (e.g., search, resource delivery);...
Building Information Modeling (BIM) offers a variety of tools to help a wide range of stakeholders in the construction industry. There has been substantial research on the advantages and challenges of implementing BIM for large and medium-sized construction companies; however, there is a dearth of research on the benefits and...
Among the suite of water resources management strategies, water banking can be a tool for water resource management in areas with high water demands or localized water scarcity. This research aims to further the understanding of water banking by conducting a review and analysis of relevant state legislation. This research...
State-of-the-art personal robots need to perform complex manipulation tasks to be viable in complex scenarios. However, many of these robots, like the PR2, use manipulators with high degrees of freedom. High degrees of freedom are desirable from a functionality standpoint, but make the learning task more difficult by adding a...
Multiagent coordination has many real-world applications such as self-driving cars, inventory management, search and rescue, package delivery, traffic management, warehouse management, and transportation. These tasks are generally character-ized by a global team objective that is often temporally sparse - realized only upon completing an episode. The sparsity of the shared...
Mystical experiences are ineffable, thus defining mysticism itself is a difficult feat. To aid in the construction of a definition of mysticism it is imperative to break down the unique elements of a mystical experience and try to give examples of where we can see all of these elements interacting....
We propose three sampling-based motion planning algorithms for generating informative mobile robot trajectories. The goal is to find a trajectory that maximizes an information quality metric (e.g. variance reduction, information gain, or mutual information) and also falls within a pre-specified budget constraint (e.g. fuel, energy, or time). Prior algorithms have...
Reef fish traded alive for table food is a high value-to-volume fishery, with demand centred in luxury markets in Hong Kong and southern mainland China. Approximately twenty countries in the Asia-Pacific region supply these markets. A number of economic, environmental and social issues have arisen from the trade; including the...
This work proposes a technique for distributed multi-robot exploration that leverages novel methods of map inference. The inference technique uses observed map structure to infer unobserved map features. The team then coordinates to explore both the inferred and observed portions of the map. Individual robots select exploration poses by accounting...