A recent concern in marine robotics is to consider the deployment of fleets of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs). Multiple vehicles with heterogeneous capabilities have several advantages over a single vehicle system, and in particular the potential to accomplish tasks faster and better than a single vehicle. This paper addresses in this context the pr...

We coordinate in discrete time the interaction of two heterogeneous groups of mobile agents: a group of ground vehicles (ugvs) and a group of aerial vehicles (uavs). The ground agents interact with each other through time-invariant, nearestneighbor rules. They synchronize their velocities through a specific communication protocol, and maintain cohesion and separation behavior by means of inter-...

The studies in aerial vehicles modeling and control have been increased rapidly recently. In this paper , a coordination of two types of heterogeneous robots , namely unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) is considered. In this paper the UAV plays the role of a virtual leader for the UGVs. The system consists of a vision- based target detection algorithm that uses the ...

The senior transportation problem (STP) is an optimization problem in which a fixed fleet of volunteer-operated, heterogeneous vehicles from multiple depots must satisfy as many elderly door-to-door transportation requests as possible within a fixed time horizon. All requests consist of a oneto-one pickup and delivery with time windows. Moreover, as the clients are seniors, a maximum ride time ...

Video image processing of traffic camera feeds is useful for counting and classify1 ing vehicles, estimating queue length, traffic speed and also for tracking individual 2 vehicles. Even after over three decades of research, challenges remain. Vehicle 3 detection is especially challenging when vehicles are occluded which is common 4 in heterogeneous traffic. Recently Deep Learning has shown rem...

Maritime search and surveillance-type missions typically require heavy human involvement. A set of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has the potential to provide a “sensor network” to greatly increase efficiency and effectiveness of these surveillance type missions. However, limited autonomy is still a bottleneck to networked UAV applications. High operator involvement is required in logistics an...

In the heterogeneous fixed fleet vehicle routing problem there are different types of vehicles and a given number of vehicles of each type. The resolution of this problem consists of assigning the customers to the existing vehicles and, in relation to each vehicle, defining the order of visiting each customer for the delivery or collection of goods. The objective is to minimize the total costs,...

Distribution planning is crucial for most companies since goods are rarely produced and consumed at the same place. Distribution costs, in addition, can be an important component of the final cost of the products. In this paper, we study a VRP variant inspired on a real case of a large distribution company. In particular, we consider a VRP with a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles that are allowed...

As autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles are deployed on the roads, they will have to eventually start communicating with each other in order to achieve increased efficiency and safety. Current approaches in the control of collaborative vehicles primarily consider homogeneous simplified vehicle dynamics and usually ignore any communication issues. This raises an important question of how syste...