Multi-robot Exploration for Environmental Monitoring: The Resource Constrained Perspective

Multi-robot Exploration for Environmental Monitoring: The Resource Constrained Perspective provides readers with the necessary robotics and mathematical tools required to realize the correct architecture. The architecture discussed in the book is not confined to environment monitoring, but can also be extended to search-and-rescue, border patrolling, crowd management and related applications. Several law enforcement agencies have already started to deploy UAVs, but instead of using teleoperated UAVs this book proposes methods to fully automate surveillance missions. Similarly, several government agencies like the US-EPA can benefit from this book by automating the process.

Several challenges when deploying such models in real missions are addressed and solved, thus laying stepping stones towards realizing the architecture proposed. This book will be a great resource for graduate students in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Robotics, Machine Learning and Mechatronics.

Part-I: The Curtain Raiser 1. Introduction 2. Target Environment 3. Utilizing Robots 4. Simultaneuous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)

Part-II: The Essentials 5. Preliminaries 6. Gaussian Process 7. Coverage Path Planning 8. Informative Path Planning

Part-III: Mission Characterization 9. Problem Formulation 10. Endurance and Energy Estimation 11. Range Estimation

Part-IV: Scaling to Multiple Robots 12. Multi-robot Systems 13. Fusion

Part-V: Continuous Spatiotemporal Dynamics 14. Temporal Evolutions

Part-VI: Epilogue 15. Algal Bloom Monitoring 16. Cumulus Cloud Monitoring 17. Search and Rescue 18. Signal strength based localization 19. Conclusion