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An extended any-angle path planning algorithm for maintaining formation of multi-agent jellyfish elimination robot system

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  • Robot and Applications
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Abstract

In recent years, the increasing influence of climate change has given rise to an uncontrolled proliferation of jellyfish in marine habitats that has visibly damaged many ecosystems and industries and poses a threat to human life. To resolve this issue, our team developed a robotic system called JEROS (Jellyfish Elimination RObotic Swarm) to successfully and efficiently remove jellyfish. JEROS consists of multiple unmanned surface vehicles that freely move in a marine environment to scavenge for and eliminate jellyfish. For controlling formation of JEROS, the leader-follower scheme is used, but this can be sometimes difficult to apply in an ocean environment. When the follower robots are tracking in accordance with the leader’s following route without the performance limitation of the robot being considered, the formation cannot be well maintained even if a formation control algorithm is applied to the robots. Maintaining formation is important for efficiency of the jellyfish removal operation. If the formation cannot be well maintained while the robots are moving, the operation area becomes irregular and consequently, the removal operation entails performing repetitive tasks. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the extended any-angle, named extended ARC (Angular-Rate-Constrained)-Theta* path planning algorithm for maintaining formation of the JEROS system to enhance the efficiency of jellyfish removal. To evaluate the performance of the proposed path planning algorithm, we performed field tests at Bang-dong Reservoir in Daejeon, South Korea.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Urban Robotics Laboratory (URL), KAIST, 291 Daehak-ro, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, 305-701, Korea

    Hanguen Kim, Donghoon Kim, Hyungjin Kim, Jae-Uk Shin & Hyun Myung

Authors
  1. Hanguen Kim
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  2. Donghoon Kim
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  3. Hyungjin Kim
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  4. Jae-Uk Shin
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  5. Hyun Myung
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hyun Myung.

Additional information

Recommended by Associate Editor Seul Jung under the direction of Editor Fuchun Sun. This research was supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning (Grant No. NRF-2013R1A1A1A05011746). This research was also financially supported by the Robot industrial cluster construction program through the Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy (MOTIE) and Korea Institute for Advancement of Technology (KIAT). The students are supported by Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MoLIT) as U-City Master and Doctor Course Grant Program.

Hanguen Kim received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea in 2009 and 2011, respectively. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree at Urban Robotics Lab., KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), Daejeon, Korea. His research interests include mobile robot navigation, artificial intelligence, human robot interaction, and surface robot.

Donghoon Kim received the B.S. degree from University of Seoul, Seoul, Korea in 2009, and the M.S. degree from KAIST, Korea in 2011. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree at Urban Robotics Lab., KAIST, Daejeon, Korea. His research interests include computer vision and surface/underwater robot.

Hyungjin Kim received the B.S. degree from Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea in 2012, and the M.S. degree from KAIST, Korea in 2014. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree at Urban Robotics Lab., KAIST, Daejeon, Korea. His research interests include probabilistic robotics, robot navigation, and surface robot.

Jae-Uk Shin received the B.S. degree from Korea University of Technology and Education, Cheonan, Korea in 2010, and the M.S. degree from KAIST, Korea in 2014. He is currently working as a research engineer at Rastech, Inc., Daejeon, Korea. His research interests include robot design, robot control, and surface robot.

Hyun Myung received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from KAIST, Daejeon, South Korea in 1998. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, KAIST. He was a principal researcher in SAIT (Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.), Yongin, Korea (2003.7-2008.2). He was a director in Emersys Corp. (2002.3-2003.6) and a senior researcher in ETRI (Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute) (1998.9-2002.2), South Korea. His research interests include the areas of mobile robot navigation, autonomous underwater vehicle, autonomous surface vehicle, SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping), evolutionary computation, numerical and combinatorial optimization, and intelligent control based on soft computing techniques.

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Kim, H., Kim, D., Kim, H. et al. An extended any-angle path planning algorithm for maintaining formation of multi-agent jellyfish elimination robot system. Int. J. Control Autom. Syst. 14, 598–607 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-014-0349-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-014-0349-0

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