Environment Modeling for Service Robots From a Task Execution Perspective

Service robots are increasingly entering the home to provide domestic tasks for residents. However, when working in an open, dynamic, and unstructured home environment, service robots still face challenges such as low intelligence for task execution and poor long-term autonomy (LTA), which has limited their deployment. As the basis of robotic task execution, environment modeling has attracted significant attention. This integrates core technologies such as environment perception, understanding, and representation to accurately recognize environmental information. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of environmental modeling from a new task-executionoriented perspective. In particular, guided by the requirements of robots in performing domestic service tasks in the home environment, we systematically review the progress that has been made in task-execution-oriented environmental modeling in four respects: 1) localization, 2) navigation, 3) manipulation, and 4) LTA. Current challenges are discussed, and potential research opportunities are also highlighted.

Air-Ground Collaborative Robots for Fire and Rescue Missions: Towards Mapping and Navigation Perspective

Air-ground collaborative robots have shown great potential in the field of fire and rescue, which can quickly respond to rescue needs and improve the efficiency of task execution. Mapping and navigation, as the key foundation for air-ground collaborative robots to achieve efficient task execution, have attracted a great deal of attention. This growing interest in collaborative robot mapping and navigation is conducive to improving the intelligence of fire and rescue task execution, but there has been no comprehensive investigation of this field to highlight their strengths. In this paper, we present a systematic review of the ground-to-ground cooperative robots for fire and rescue from a new perspective of mapping and navigation. First, an air-ground collaborative robots framework for fire and rescue missions based on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) mapping and unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) navigation is introduced. Then, the research progress of mapping and navigation under this framework is systematically summarized, including UAV mapping, UAV/UGV co-localization, and UGV navigation, with their main achievements and limitations. Based on the needs of fire and rescue missions, the collaborative robots with different numbers of UAVs and UGVs are classified, and their practicality in fire and rescue tasks is elaborated, with a focus on the discussion of their merits and demerits. In addition, the application examples of air-ground collaborative robots in various firefighting and rescue scenarios are given. Finally, this paper emphasizes the current challenges and potential research opportunities, rounding up references for practitioners and researchers willing to engage in this vibrant area of air-ground collaborative robots.

Bi-AM-RRT*: A Fast and Efficient Sampling-Based Motion Planning Algorithm in Dynamic Environments

The efficiency of sampling-based motion planning brings wide application in autonomous mobile robots. Conventional rapidly exploring random tree (RRT) algorithm and its variants have gained great successes, but there are still challenges for the real-time optimal motion planning of mobile robots in dynamic environments. In this paper, based on Bidirectional RRT (Bi-RRT) and the use of an assisting metric (AM), we propose a novel motion planning algorithm, namely Bi-AM-RRT*. Different from the existing RRT-based methods, the AM is introduced in this paper to optimize the performance of robot motion planning in dynamic environments with obstacles. On this basis, the bidirectional search sampling strategy is employed, in order to increase the planning efficiency. Further, we present an improved rewiring method to shorten path lengths. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed Bi-AM-RRT* are proved through comparative experiments in different environments. Experimental results show that the Bi-AM-RRT* algorithm can achieve better performance in terms of path length and search time.