During the seminar, I will present our work on planning near-time-optimal plans
for building walls with Aerial Robots.

Reference:
B. Elkhapery, R. Pěnička, M. Němec, M. Siddiqui, "Metaheuristic planner for
cooperative multi-agent wall construction with UAVs," in Automation in
Construction, vol. 152, April 2023, doi: 10.1016/j.autcon.2023.104908.

Paper Abstract:
This paper introduces a wall construction planner for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
(UAVs), which uses a Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP)
metaheuristic to generate near-time-optimal building plans for even large walls
within seconds. This approach addresses one of the most time-consuming and
labor-intensive tasks, while also minimizing workers’ safety risks. To
achieve
this, the wall-building problem is modeled as a variant of the Team
Orienteering
Problem and is formulated as Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP), with
added
precedence and concurrence constraints that ensure bricks are built in the
correct order and without collision between cooperating agents. The GRASP
planner is validated in a realistic simulation and demonstrated to find
solutions with similar quality as the optimal MILP, but much faster. Moreover,
it outperforms all other state-of-the-art planning approaches in the majority
of
test cases. This paper presents a significant advancement in the field of
automated wall construction, demonstrating the potential of UAVs and
optimization algorithms in improving the efficiency and safety of construction
projects.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.autcon.2023.104908

The seminar will be of a short length (20 minutes + 10 minutes discussion).