Many important problems involving a group of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) are closely related to the multi traviling salesman problem (m-TSP). This paper comprises a comparative study of a number of algorithms proposed in the litterature to solve m-TSPs occuring in robotics. The investigated algoritms include two mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulations, a market based approach (MA)

Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) equipped with surveillance cameras present a flexible complement to the numerous stationary sensors being used in security applications today. However, to take full advantage of the flexibility and speed offered by a group of UGV platforms, a fast way to compute desired camera locations to cover an area or a set of buildings, e.g., in response to an alarm, is needed

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication is the key technology enabling platooning. This letter proposes an analytical framework that combines the characteristics of V2V communication (packet loss probabilities and packet transmission delays) with the physical mobility characteristics of vehicles (speed, distance between vehicles and their brake capacities). First, we present the feasible region of

The reconstruction of an object’s shape or surface from a set of 3D points plays an important role in medical image analysis, e.g. in anatomy reconstruction from tomographic measurements or in the process of aligning intra-operative navigation and preoperative planning data. In such scenarios, one usually has to deal with sparse data, which significantly aggravates the problem of reconstruction. H

The matching of multiple objects (e.g. shapes or images) is a fundamental problem in vision and graphics. In order to robustly handle ambiguities, noise and repetitive patterns in challenging real-world settings, it is essential to take geometric consistency between points into account. Computationally, the multi-matching problem is difficult. It can be phrased as simultaneously solving multiple (

Finding correspondences between shapes is a fundamental problem in computer vision and graphics, which is relevant for many applications, including 3D reconstruction, object tracking, and style transfer. The vast majority of correspondence methods aim to find a solution between pairs of shapes, even if multiple instances of the same class are available. While isometries are often studied in shape

In this work we study permutation synchronisation for the challenging case of partial permutations, which plays an important role for the problem of matching multiple objects (e.g. images or shapes). The term synchronisation refers to the property that the set of pairwise matchings is cycle-consistent, i.e. in the full matching case all compositions of pairwise matchings over cycles must be equal

Statistical shape models based on point distribution models are powerful tools for image segmentation or shape analysis. The most challenging part in the generation of point distribution models is the identification of corresponding landmarks among all training shapes. Since in general the true correspondences are unknown, correspondences are frequently established under the hypothesis that correc

In this concise yet comprehensive Open Access textbook, future inventors are introduced to the key concepts of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Using modeling as a way to develop deeper understanding of the computational and physical components of these systems, one can express new designs in a way that facilitates their simulation, visualization, and analysis. Concepts are introduced in a cross-disc

A platoon consists of a string of vehicles traveling close together. Such tight formation allows for increased road throughput and reduced fuel consumption due to decreased air resistance. Furthermore, sensors and control algorithms can be used to provide a high level of automation. In this context, safety - in terms of no rear-end collisions - is a key property that needs to be assured. We invest

Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) equipped with surveillance cameras present a flexible complement to the numerous stationary sensors being used in security applications today. However, to take full advantage of the flexibility and speed offered by a group of UGV platforms, a fast way to compute desired camera locations that cover or surround a set of buildings e.g., in response to an alarm, is need

Representing 3D shape deformations by high-dimensional linear models has many applications in computer vision and medical imaging. Commonly, using Principal Components Analysis a low-dimensional subspace of the high-dimensional shape space is determined. However, the resulting factors (the most dominant eigenvectors of the covariance matrix) have global support, i.e. changing the coefficient of a

We propose a combinatorial solution for the problem of non-rigidly matching a 3D shape to 3D image data. To this end, we model the shape as a triangular mesh and allow each triangle of this mesh to be rigidly transformed to achieve a suitable matching to the image. By penalising the distance and the relative rotation between neighbouring triangles our matching compromises between the image and the

In this paper we give a distributed solution to the problem of making a team of non-holonomic robots achieve the same heading (attitude consensus problem) using vision sensors with limited field of view. The use of cameras with constrained field of view limits the information the robots perceive compared to other omnidirectional sensors. This makes the consensus problem more complicated, because t

This note presents two theorems on asymptotic state consensus of continuous time nonlinear multi-agent systems. The agents reside in Rm and have switching interconnection topologies. Both the first theorem, formulated in terms of the states of individual agents, and the second theorem, formulated in terms of the pairwise states for pairs of agents, can be interpreted as variants of Lyapunov's seco

The Kuramoto model evolves on the circle, i.e., the 1-sphere mathsf S^ 1. A graph mathcal G is referred to as mathsf S^ 1 -synchronizing if the Kuramoto model on mathcal G synchronizes almost globally. This paper generalizes the Kuramoto model and the concept of synchronizing graphs to the Stiefel manifold St (p, n). Previous work on generalizations of the Kuramoto model have largely been influenc

In this paper, the multi pursuer version of the pursuit evasion problem in polygonal environments is addressed. This problem is NP-hard, and therefore we seek good enough, but not optimal solutions. By modeling the problem as a Boolean Control Network, we can efficiently keep track of which regions are cleared, and which are not, while the input nodes of the network are used to represent the motio

This letter provides a safety analysis for emergencybraking scenarios involving consecutive vehicles. The vehicles useadaptive cruise control (ACC) with a constant-distance policytogether with additional vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communicationfor emergency braking. We provide explicit formulas describinghow the minimum safe inter-vehicle distance (IVD), for avoidingrear-end collision, can be shorte

Consensus problems for complex networked systems composed of interconnected interacting agents have received considerable attention in recent years partly due to the ever-increasing number of applications in various areas, such as swarm dynamics, smart grids, sensor networks, intelligent transportation systems, unmanned aerial vehicles, telerobotics, and the military. The design of consensus proto