Alejandro R. Mosteo

Centro Universitario de la Defensa · Telecommunications, Informatics and Automation

The growing interest in robot teams for surveillance or rescue missions entails new technological challenges. Robots have to move to complete their tasks while maintaining communication among themselves and with their human operators, in many cases without the aid of a communication infrastructure. Guaranteeing connectivity enables robots to explic...

Many multi-robot problems require the achievement of formations as part of the overall mission. This work considers a scenario in which unlabeled homogeneous robots must adopt a given formation pattern buildable anywhere in the environment. This involves finding the relative pose of the formation in regard to the initial robot positions, understood...

The ReactiveX API, also known as the Reactive Extensions in the .NET world, is a recently popularized reactive programming framework for asynchronous, event-based, multi-threaded programming. Presented by its proponents as a solid tool for applications requiring a simple yet powerful approach to event-driven systems, it has seen favorable adoption...

Given the variety of topics that compose a bachelor's program, even the most motivated students may find themselves uninterested in a particular subject. A relevant example is the service academies, where students usually have a strong military vocation but their interest in other apparently unrelated but mandatory topics cannot be taken for grante...

A common assumption made in multi-robot research is that robots operate in a fully networked environment, where any two robots can communicate reliably at any time. However, in real-world missions over large geographical areas robots have a limited communication range and signal propagation conditions may be unpredictable due to obstacles or interf...

Ada 2022 introduces new features that enable more natural-looking initializations. On the one hand, it is now possible to use universal numbers and strings to initialize any private type; on the other hand, containers can be initialized directly without the explicit use of converting functions. Both features are enabled through new aspects that ass...

The Alire Package Manager released its first stable version in 2021 and, since then, it has seen continued improvement and new features. Herein we present the latest major features that have been added for the benefit of Ada developers, which include toolchain installation, a publishing assistant, generation of configuration code, and a so-called p...

One of the challenges in the field of autonomous robotics is the thorough testing of the navigation capabilities of the different methods in a wide variety of situations. Towards this end, simulation plays an ever increasingly important role as the improvements in the technology keep closing the gap between reality and simulation. This work present...

Underground environments are some of the most challenging for autonomous navigation. The long, featureless corridors, loose and slippery soils, bad illumination and unavailability of global localization make many traditional approaches struggle. In this work, a topological-based navigation system is presented that enables autonomous navigation of a...

Functional-style iterators are present in many popular languages as a way of processing data in several connected steps, in a safe and readable manner. By contrast, Ada started providing general iterators only with its 2012 revision, in a way not directly intended for sequential composition. This paper presents a functional iterators library design...

The ReactiveX API, also known as the Reactive Extensions in the .NET world, is a popular functional reactive programming framework for asynchronous, event-based, multithreaded programming. Although Ada built-in tasking reduces the dire needs for additional multithreading support of some other languages, the reactive approach has properties that are...

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a commonly used framework in many fields of robotics research, with increasing presence in the industry. The next iteration of this framework, ROS2, aims to improve observed shortcomings of its predecessor like deterministic memory allocation and real-time characteristics. The officially supported languages in RO...

Sensor networks can monitor wide areas to gather information and relay alerts about concerning events. Response robotic missions in confined scenarios where such a network existed, like tunnels or mines, could take advantage of it as a backbone. This paper addresses challenges arising from the combined characteristics of nodes, typically of low pow...

This paper studies the problem of multi-robot formations by means of distributed optimization. In order to reach a desired configuration, robots can adjust two elements, the set of desired positions and the particular role of each robot within the formation. Although the two problems, positions and assignment, have been deeply studied separately, t...

El auge de la robótica en las últimas décadas se traduce en una serie de frentes de investigación que abordan multitud de tareas que pueden automatizarse mediante el uso de robots. Especialmente ambiciosas e interesantes son las propuestas de equipos de robots móviles que operan autónomamente, con mínima supervisión y control por parte de operadore...

This project describes all the necessary steps to build a low-cost mobile platform equipped with a robotic arm. A Kinect-guided custom robotic arm on the TurtleBot platform enhances the vacuum cleaner with basic manipulation capabilities. All stages in the project involve standard hardware components and open-source software mod-ules. 1) The roboti...

En este trabajo se presenta un sistema multi-robot para localización e identificación de vehículos que están estacionados en un recinto abierto o cerrado. El sistema realiza una planificación a priori y una asignación de tareas a los miembros del equipo optimizando el tiempo de la misión. El equipo de robots está dotado de sensores de visión que pe...

As field robot teams mature and their missions become more ambitious, new real world challenges become more prominent. Problems that were previously not an issue in small experimental setups, or that were typically left out in sim- ulation, are attracting increasing interest in order to expand the applicability of such robotic teams. Communication...

Mobile robotics and autonomous systems are subjects of increasing interest in the curricula of engineering studies, being application domains of growing importance in leading research and industry trends. In order to fulfill this demand, we have designed a robotics course for students from different engineering degrees and backgrounds. The course i...

This report offers an overview of principal approaches to task allocation in the context of mobile robotics, with a strong focus in solutions used in service and field robotics. Popular methodologies are identified and their strengths and shortcomings discussed. Critical properties of algorithms are described and examined in recently proposed archi...

Autonomous robots working in a shared environment require new coordination capabilities in order to achieve enhanced efficiency: planning to decide what is the best way to tackle a problem and task allocation to decide which robot will perform each workload. The latter, which is the main focus of this thesis, has been addressed by many different me...

In previous work we presented a multi-robot strategy for routing missions in large scenarios where network connectivity must be explicitly preserved. This strategy is founded on the traversal of path trees in such a way that connectivity to a static control center is always maintained, while ensuring that any target that is reachable by a chain con...

Teams of mobile robots have been recently proposed as effective means of completing complex missions involving multiple tasks spatially distributed over a large area. A central problem in such domains is multi-robot routing, namely the problem of coordinating a team of robots in terms of the locations they should visit and the routes they should fo...

We present Sancta, a flexible control architecture for multi- robot teams. It is fully written in Ada 2005, except for the reuse of some C libraries. In this paper we highlight the architectural elements of our implementation and also present our experiences using the cutting-edge 2005 implementation from GNAT, through its GPL 2005 and 2006 it- era...

Auction based techniques are a highly successful tool used for multi-robot task allocation. However, theoretical performance and a proper taxonomy of optimization objectives have remained scarce until recent studies. Implementations from different authors have not been compared in common grounds and in light of these recent findings. In this paper...