Aerospace and Electronic Systems - March 2019 - 3

ARIES: AN AUTONOMOUS CONTROLLER FOR MULTIROBOT COOPERATION
Cooperation in heterogeneous robotics teams is getting attention from multiple areas, such as
surveillance, search and rescue, or space exploration. Heterogeneous robots teams can exploit
advantages of each robotic platform, allowing us to operate simultaneously on-ground, air and
in water environments, which is usually not suitable for homogeneous swarms. Focusing on
space exploration, NASA considers a multiple robot team for future Mars explorations in order
to maximize the scientific return, by means of the cooperation of a rover and an aerial drone.
However, the cooperation between them in such challenging scenario entails several problems,
that, in general, require the inclusion of autonomy. In this sense, autonomous controllers are
known as expertise entities that enable the cooperation and coordination in multiple robot systems, allowing the robot team to cope with flexibility, scalability, and fault-tolerant capabilities.
This paper describes the Autonomous coopeRatIve Execution System (ARIES), an autonomous
controller designed for the deployment of cooperative robot teams. ARIES is based on the
leader-follower approach where both leader and follower(s) are intelligent agents built on top
of the Teleo-Reactive EXecutive (T-REX) system. T-REX is a multiagent architecture that
interleaves sensing, planning, and execution. Nevertheless, T-REX is not a suited architecture
for multirobot cooperation. In this way, the objective of ARIES is to enable the cooperation
among distributed agents in a T-REX-based architecture. We present a study case to
demonstrate the ARIES capabilities in a particular exploration scenario simulating a hybrid
UGV-UAV system.

ENERGY-EFFICIENT ROUTING ALGORITHM BASED ON LOCALIZATION AND CLUSTERING
TECHNIQUES FOR AGRICULTURAL APPLICATIONS
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have a significant role in real-time decision-making systems,
which are mainly related to different environmental and physical parameter monitoring. In this
context, modern agricultural systems are, nowadays, based on WSNs to have a complete and
real-time overview about the changes in the field and the crops state. Thereby, the lifetime
of the deployed sensor nodes is important for reducing the duration of maintenance intervals.
One of the decisive factors for this is the routing protocol, which decides about the number of
messages in the network and the necessary sending power. In this paper, an energy-efficient
routing algorithm is proposed, which enables us to reduce the power consumption for data transmission. The proposed algorithm is mainly based on two phases: An offline phase and an online
phase. During the offline phase, localization is carried out to estimate real nodes position and to
have an overview of the overall of the network. Once nodes are located, the online phase starts.
It is composed of two subsystems: The clustering phase and data transmission phase. The clustering enables us to recognize the neighbors of each node and to select adequate cluster head
for each defined node group, which takes over the communication to neighbor clusters.
The results show that applying intelligent clustering algorithms can help us to reduce the energy
consumption.

MARCH 2019

IEEE A&E SYSTEMS MAGAZINE

Aerospace and Electronic Systems - March 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Aerospace and Electronic Systems - March 2019