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Ettore Ferranti

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

4 papers

2 author rows

IROS Conference 2008 Conference Paper

HybridExploration: A distributed approach to terrain exploration using mobile and fixed sensor nodes

Ettore Ferranti
Niki Trigoni
Mark Levene

When an emergency occurs within a building, it may be initially safer to send autonomous mobile nodes, instead of human responders, to explore the area and identify hazards and victims. Exploring all the area in the minimum amount of time and reporting back interesting findings to the human personnel outside the building is an essential part of rescue operations. Our assumptions are that the area map is unknown, there is no existing network infrastructure, long-range wireless communication is unreliable and nodes are not location-aware. We take into account these limitations, and propose a novel algorithm, HybridExploration, that makes use of both mobile nodes (robots, called agents) and stationary nodes (inexpensive smart devices, called tags). As agents enter the emergency area, they sprinkle tags within the space to label the environment with states. By reading and updating the state of the local tags, agents are able to coordinate indirectly with each other, without relying on direct agent-to-agent communication. In addition, tags wirelessly exchange local information with nearby tags to further assist agents in their exploration task. Our simulation results show that the proposed algorithm, which exploits both tag-to-tag and agent-to-tag communication, outperforms previous algorithms that rely only on agent-to-tag communication.

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JAAMAS Journal 2008 Journal Article

Rapid exploration of unknown areas through dynamic deployment of mobile and stationary sensor nodes

Ettore Ferranti
Niki Trigoni
Mark Levene

Abstract When an emergency occurs within a building, it may be initially safer to send autonomous mobile nodes, instead of human responders, to explore the area and identify hazards and victims. Exploring all the area in the minimum amount of time and reporting back interesting findings to the human personnel outside the building is an essential part of rescue operations. Our assumptions are that the area map is unknown, there is no existing network infrastructure, long-range wireless communication is unreliable and nodes are not location-aware. We take into account these limitations, and propose an architecture consisting of both mobile nodes (robots, called agents) and stationary nodes (inexpensive smart devices, called tags). As agents enter the emergency area, they sprinkle tags within the space to label the environment with states. By reading and updating the state of the local tags, agents are able to coordinate indirectly with each other, without relying on direct agent-to-agent communication. In addition, tags wirelessly exchange local information with nearby tags to further assist agents in their exploration task. Our simulation results show that the proposed algorithm, which exploits both tag-to-tag and agent-to-tag communication, outperforms previous algorithms that rely only on agent-to-tag communication.

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ICRA Conference 2008 Conference Paper

Robot-assisted discovery of evacuation routes in emergency scenarios

Ettore Ferranti
Niki Trigoni

When an emergency occurs within a building, it is crucial to guide victims towards emergency exits or human responders towards the locations of victims and hazards. The objective of this work is thus to devise distributed algorithms that allow agents to dynamically discover and maintain short evacuation routes connecting emergency exits to critical cells in the area. We propose two Evacuation Route Discovery mechanisms, Agent2Tag-ERD and Tag2Tag-ERD, and show how they can be seamlessly integrated with existing exploration algorithms, like Ants, MDFS and Brick&Mortar. We then examine the interplay between the tasks of area exploration and evacuation route discovery; our goal is to assess whether the exploration algorithm influences the length of evacuation paths and the time that they are first discovered. Finally, we perform an extensive simulation to assess the impact of the area topology on the quality of discovered evacuation paths.

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ICRA Conference 2007 Conference Paper

Brick & Mortar: an on-line multi-agent exploration algorithm

Ettore Ferranti
Niki Trigoni
Mark Levene

When an emergency occurs within a building, it is critical to explore the area as fast as possible in order to find victims and identify hazards. We propose Brick& Mortar, an algorithm for the autonomous exploration of unknown terrains by a team of mobile nodes, referred to as agents. Because of the unreliability and short range of wireless communications in an indoor environment we suggest that agents communicate indirectly with each other by tagging the environment. Agents have no prior knowledge of the terrain map, but are able to coordinate in order to explore a variety of terrains with different topological features. In our experimental evaluation, we show that Brick&Mortar significantly outperforms the competing algorithms, namely Ants and Multiple Depth First Search, in terms of exploration time. The observed performance benefits suggest that our algorithm is suitable for safety-critical applications that require rapid area coverage for real-time event detection and response.

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