Hybrid Navigation System Based Autonomous Positioning and Path Planning for Mobile Robots

Positioning and navigation technology is a new trend of research in mobile robot area.Existing researches focus on the indoor industrial problems,while many application fields are in the outdoor environment,which put forward higher requirements for sensor selection and navigation scheme.In this paper,a complete hybrid navigation system for a class of mobile robots with load tasks and docking tasks is presented.The work can realize large-range autonomous positioning and path planning for mobile robots in unstructured scenarios.The autonomous positioning is achieved by adopting suitable guidance methods to meet different application requirements and accuracy requirements in conditions of different distances.Based on the Bezier curve,a path planning scheme is proposed and a motion controller is designed to make the mobile robot follow the target path.The Kalman filter is established to process the guidance signals and control outputs of the motion controller.Finally,the autonomous positioning and docking experiment are carried out.The results of the research verify the effectiveness of the hybrid navigation,which can be used in autonomous warehousing logistics and multi-mobile robot system.

Graph neural network-based scheduling for multi-UAV-enabled communications in D2D networks

In this paper,we jointly design the power control and position dispatch for Multi-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV)-enabled communication in Device-to-Device(D2D)networks.Our objective is to maximize the total transmission rate of Downlink Users(DUs).Meanwhile,the Quality of Service(QoS)of all D2D users must be satisfied.We comprehensively considered the interference among D2D communications and downlink transmissions.The original problem is strongly non-convex,which requires high computational complexity for traditional optimization methods.And to make matters worse,the results are not necessarily globally optimal.In this paper,we propose a novel Graph Neural Networks(GNN)based approach that can map the considered system into a specific graph structure and achieve the optimal solution in a low complexity manner.Particularly,we first construct a GNN-based model for the proposed network,in which the transmission links and interference links are formulated as vertexes and edges,respectively.Then,by taking the channel state information and the coordinates of ground users as the inputs,as well as the location of UAVs and the transmission power of all transmitters as outputs,we obtain the mapping from inputs to outputs through training the parameters of GNN.Simulation results verified that the way to maximize the total transmission rate of DUs can be extracted effectively via the training on samples.Moreover,it also shows that the performance of proposed GNN-based method is better than that of traditional means.

Base position planning of mobile manipulators for assembly tasks in construction environments

With good mobility and flexibility,mobile manipulators have shown broad applications in construction scenarios.Base position(BP)planning,which refers to the robot autonomously determining its working station in the environment,is an important technique for mobile manipulators when performing the construction assembly task,especially in a large-scale construction environment.However,the BP planning process is tedious and time-consuming for a human worker to carry out.Thus,to improve the efficiency of construction assembly tasks,a novel BP planning method is proposed in this paper,which can lead to appropriate BPs and minimize the number of BPs at the same time.Firstly,the feasible BP regions are generated based on the grid division and the variable workspace of the mobile manipulator.Then,the positioning uncertainties of the mobile manipulator are considered in calculating the preferred BP areas using clustering.Lastly,a set coverage optimization model is established to obtain the minimum number of BPs using an optimization algorithm according to the greedy principle.The simulated experiment based on a 9-degree of free(DoF)mobile manipulator has been performed.The results illustrated that the time for BP planning was significantly reduced and the number of BPs was reduced by 63.41%compared to existing manual planning,which demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.

A Study on the Methods for Estimating the Distribution of Pedestrians in an Underground Mall by Use of Watch Cameras

This paper shows the method of estimating spatiotemporal distribution of pedestrians by using watch cameras. We estimate the distribution without tracking technology, with pedestrian＇s privacy protected and in Umeda underground mall. Lately spatiotemporal distribution of pedestrians has being increasingly important in the field of urban planning, disaster prevention planning, marketing and so on. Although many researchers have tried to capture the information of location as dealing with some sensors, some problems still remain, such as the investment of sensors, the restriction of the number of people who has the device they are able to capture. From such background, we develop an original labelling algorithm and estimate the spatiotemporal distribution of pedestrians and the information of the passing time and the direction of pedestrians from sequential images of a watch camera.