Numerical Evaluation of Sample Gathering Solutions for Mobile Robots

This paper applies mathematical modeling and solution numerical evaluation to the problem of collecting a set of samples scattered throughout a graph environment and transporting them to a storage facility. A team of identical robots is available, where each robot has a limited amount of energy and...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inApplied sciences Vol. 9; no. 4; p. 791
Main Authors Burlacu, Adrian, Kloetzer, Marius, Mahulea, Cristian
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 23.02.2019
Subjects
Algorithms
centralized architecture
Employment
Energy
Heuristic
Heuristic methods
Integer programming
Linear programming
mathematical modeling
Methods
mobile robots
numerical evaluation
optimization
Problem solving
Robots
sample gathering problem
System theory
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Summary:This paper applies mathematical modeling and solution numerical evaluation to the problem of collecting a set of samples scattered throughout a graph environment and transporting them to a storage facility. A team of identical robots is available, where each robot has a limited amount of energy and it can carry one sample at a time. The graph weights are related to energy and time consumed for moving between adjacent nodes, and thus, the task is transformed to a specific optimal assignment problem. The design of the mathematical model starts from a mixed-integer linear programming problem whose solution yields an optimal movement plan that minimizes the total time for gathering all samples. For reducing the computational complexity of the optimal solution, we develop two sub-optimal relaxations and then we quantitatively compare all the approaches based on extensive numerical simulations. The numerical evaluation yields a decision diagram that can help a user to choose the appropriate method for a given problem instance.
ISSN:2076-3417
2076-3417
DOI:10.3390/app9040791