arXiv subjects

Kostas Alexis

Publications and source records attributed to Kostas Alexis.

94 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2017

Towards Robotically Supported Decommissioning of Nuclear Sites

This paper overviews certain radiation detection, perception, and planning challenges for nuclearized robotics that aim to support the waste management and decommissioning mission. To enable the autonomous monitoring, inspection and multi-modal characterization of nuclear sites, we discuss important problems relevant to the tasks of navigation in degraded visual environments, localizability-aware exploration and mapping without any prior knowledge of the environment, as well as robotic radiation detection. Future contributions will focus on each of the relevant problems, will aim to deliver a comprehensive multi-modal mapping result, and will emphasize on extensive field evaluation and system verification.

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arXiv2017

Realizing the Aerial Robotic Worker for Inspection Operations

This report overviews a set of recent contributions in the field of path planning that were developed to enable the realization of the autonomous aerial robotic worker for inspection operations. The specific algorithmic contributions address several fundamental challenges of robotic inspection and exploration, and specifically those of optimal coverage planning given an a priori known model of the structure to be inspected, full coverage, optimized and fast inspection path planning, as well as efficient exploration of completely unknown environments and structures. All of the developed path planners support both holonomic and nonholonomic systems, and respect the on-board sensor model and constraints. An overview of the achieved results, followed by an integrating architecture in order to enable fully autonomous and highly-efficient infrastructure inspection in both known and unknown environments.

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arXiv2016

Technical Report: Optimal Surveillance of Dynamic Parades using Teams of Aerial Robots

This technical report addresses the problem of optimal surveillance of the route followed by a dynamic parade using a team of aerial robots. The dynamic parade is considered to take place within an urban environment, it is discretized and at every iteration, the algorithm computes the best possible placing of the aerial robotic team members, subject to their camera model and the occlusions arising from the environment. As the parade route is only as well covered as its least-covered point, the optimization objective is to place the aerial robots such that they maximize the minimum coverage over the points in the route at every time instant of it. A set of simulation studies is used to demonstrate the operation and performance characteristics of the approach, while computational analysis is also provided and verifies the good scalability properties of the contributed algorithm regarding the size of the aerial robotics team.

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arXiv2016

Distributed Infrastructure Inspection Path Planning subject to Time Constraints

Within this paper, the problem of 3D structural inspection path planning for distributed infrastructure using aerial robots that are subject to time constraints is addressed. The proposed algorithm handles varying spatial properties of the infrastructure facilities, accounts for their different importance and exploration function and computes an overall inspection path of high inspection reward while respecting the robot endurance or mission time constraints as well as the vehicle dynamics and sensor limitations. To achieve its goal, it employs an iterative, 3-step optimization strategy at each iteration of which it first randomly samples a set of possible structures to visit, subsequently solves the derived traveling salesman problem and computes the travel costs, while finally it samples and assigns inspection times to each structure and evaluates the total inspection reward. For the derivation of the inspection paths per each independent facility, it interfaces a path planner dedicated to the 3D coverage of single structures. The resulting algorithm properties, computational performance and path quality are evaluated using simulation studies as well as experimental test-cases employing a multirotor micro aerial vehicle.

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