Point-wise Fusion of Distributed Gaussian Process Experts (FuDGE) using a fully decentralized robot team operating in communication-devoid environment

Kshitij Tiwari, Sungmoon Jeong, Nak Young Chong

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on large-scale environment monitoring by utilizing a fully decentralized team of mobile robots. The robots utilize the resource constrained-decentralized active sensing scheme to select the most informative (uncertain) locations to observe while conserving allocated resources (battery, travel distance, etc.). We utilize a distributed Gaussian process (GP) framework to split the computational load over our fleet of robots. Since each robot is individually generating a model of the environment, there may be conflicting predictions for test locations. Thus, in this paper, we propose an algorithm for aggregating individual prediction models into a single globally consistent model that can be used to infer the overall spatial dynamics of the environment. To make a prediction at a previously unobserved location, we propose a novel gating network for a mixture-of-experts model wherein the weight of an expert is determined by the responsibility of the expert over the unvisited location. The benefit of posing our problem as a centralized fusion with a distributed GP computation approach is that the robots never communicate with each other, individually optimize their own GP models based on their respective observations, and off-load all their learnt models on the base station only at the end of their respective mission times. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using publicly available datasets.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)820-828
Number of pages9
JournalIEEE Transactions on Robotics
Volume34
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2018

Keywords

  • Distributed robot systems
  • field robots
  • model fusion
  • path planning for multiple mobile robot systems
  • surveillance systems

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Point-wise Fusion of Distributed Gaussian Process Experts (FuDGE) using a fully decentralized robot team operating in communication-devoid environment'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this