Publications by Alcherio Martinoli

Multi-robot System Architectures

Alcherio Martinoli, Cyrill Silvan Baumann, Izzet Kagan Erünsal

Springer2025

Sense in Motion with Belief Clustering: Efficient Gas Source Localization with Mobile Robots

Given the patchy nature of gas plumes and the slow response of conventional gas sensors, the use of mobile robots for Gas Source Localization (GSL) tasks presents significant challenges. These aspects increase the difficulties in obtaining gas measurements ...

2024

Multi-Robot Online Coverage with a Team of Resource-Constrained Micro Aerial Vehicles

Alcherio Martinoli, Lucas Cédric Wälti, Izzet Kagan Erünsal

We present a novel coordination scheme for online multi-robot coverage with a team of resource-constrained aerial vehicles relying on the PH-tree data structure. We propose a hybrid system architecture where coverage tasks are assigned to robots in a centr ...

Springer2024

Lumped Drag Model Identification and Real-Time External Force Detection for Rotary-Wing Micro Aerial Vehicles

Alcherio Martinoli, Lucas Cédric Wälti

This work focuses on understanding and identifying the drag forces applied to a rotary-wing Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV). We propose a lumped drag model that concisely describes the aerodynamical forces the MAV is subject to, with a minimal set of parameters ...

IEEE2024

Design and Evaluation of Modular Gas and Wind Sensing Nodes for Static and Mobile Deployments

Alcherio Martinoli, Emmanuel Droz, Wanting Jin

Static and mobile sensor nodes can be employed in gas monitoring tasks to detect gas leaks in an early stage and localize gas sources. Due to the intermittent nature of gas plumes and the slow dynamics of commonly used gas sensors, measuring gas concentrat ...

2024

Automatic Multi-Robot Control Design and Optimization Leveraging Multi-Level Modeling: An Exploration Case Study

Alcherio Martinoli, Cyrill Silvan Baumann, Wakana Endo

More specifically, a behavior-based controller for a multi-robot exploration scenario is automatically synthesized using a predefined set of basic behaviors and conditions. A key feature of the used synthesis approach is the tailored use of two modeling le ...

Elsevier2023

Multi-Robot 3D Gas Distribution Mapping: Coordination, Information Sharing and Environmental Knowledge

Alcherio Martinoli, Chiara Ercolani, Thomas Laurent Peeters

Environmental monitoring and mapping operations are an essential tool to combat climate change. An important branch of this domain concerns the construction of reliable gas maps. Adaptive navigation strategies coupled with multi-robot systems improve the o ...

2023

3D Gas Sensing with Multiple Nano Aerial Vehicles: Interference Analysis, Algorithms and Experimental Validation

Alcherio Martinoli, Chiara Ercolani, Wanting Jin

Within the scope of the ongoing efforts to fight climate change, the application of multirobot systems to environmental mapping and monitoring missions is a prominent approach aimed at increasing exploration efficiency. However, the application of such sys ...

2023

Information-Driven Gas Distribution Mapping for Autonomous Mobile Robots

Alcherio Martinoli, Faezeh Rahbar, Chiara Ercolani

The ability to sense airborne pollutants with mobile robots provides a valuable asset for domains such as industrial safety and environmental monitoring. Oftentimes, this involves detecting how certain gases are spread out in the environment, commonly refe ...

MDPI2023

Towards Efficient Gas Leak Detection in Built Environments: Data-Driven Plume Modeling for Gas Sensing Robots

Alcherio Martinoli, Faezeh Rahbar, Chiara Ercolani, Wanting Jin

The deployment of robots for Gas Source Lo- calization (GSL) tasks in hazardous scenarios significantly reduces the risk to humans and animals. Gas sensing using mobile robots focuses primarily on simplified scenarios, due to the complexity of gas dispersi ...

2023

A Noise-Resistant Mixed-Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm for the Automatic Design of Robotic Controllers

Alcherio Martinoli, Cyrill Silvan Baumann

The automatic design of well-performing robotic controllers is still an unsolved problem due to the inherently large parameter space and noisy, often hard-to-define performance metrics, especially when sequential tasks need to be accomplished. Distal contr ...

2022

Hybrid Flock - Formation Control Algorithms

Alcherio Martinoli, Cyrill Silvan Baumann, Jonas Perolini, Emna Tourki

Two prominent categories for achieving coordinated multirobot displacement are flocking and navigation in formation. Both categories have their own body of literature and characteristics, including their respective advantages and disadvantages. While typic ...

Springer Nature Switzerland2022

Leveraging Multi-Level Modelling to Automatically Design Behavioral Arbitrators in Robotic Controllers

Alcherio Martinoli, Cyrill Silvan Baumann, Hugo Richard Birch

Automatic control design for robotic systems is becoming more and more popular. However, this usually involves a significant computational cost, due to the expensive and noisy evaluation of candidate solutions through highfidelity simulation or even real h ...

2022

GaSLAM: An Algorithm for Simultaneous Gas Source Localization and Gas Distribution Mapping in 3D

Alcherio Martinoli, Chiara Ercolani, Lixuan Tang

Chemical gas dispersion poses considerable threat to humans, animals and the environment. The research areas of gas source localization and gas distribution mapping aim to localize the source of gas leaks and map the gas plume respectively, in order to hel ...

2022

Clustering and Informative Path Planning for 3D Gas Distribution Mapping: Algorithms and Performance Evaluation

Alcherio Martinoli, Chiara Ercolani, Ankita Arun Humne, Lixuan Tang

Chemical gas dispersion can represent a severe threat to human and animal lives, as well as to the environment. Constructing a map of the distribution of gas in a fast and reliable manner is critical to ensure accurate monitoring of at-risk facilities and ...

2022

A Distributed Architecture for Onboard Tightly-Coupled Estimation and Predictive Control of Micro Aerial Vehicle Formations

Alcherio Martinoli, Izzet Kagan Erünsal

This paper presents a distributed estimation and control architecture for leader-follower formations of multi-rotor micro aerial vehicles. The architecture involves multi-rate extended Kalman filtering and nonlinear model predictive control in order to opt ...

Springer2022

Spatial microscopic modeling of collective movements in multi-robot systems: Design choices and calibration

Alcherio Martinoli, Cyrill Silvan Baumann

Despite the strong increase in available computational power enabling an unprecedented level of realism in simulation, modeling robotic systems at higher abstraction level remains crucial to efficiently design robot controllers and analyze their properties ...

2022

Linear and Nonlinear Model Predictive Control Strategies for Trajectory Tracking Micro Aerial Vehicles: A Comparative Study

Alcherio Martinoli, Izzet Kagan Erünsal

This paper presents a comparison of linear and nonlinear Model Predictive Control (MPC) strategies for trajectory tracking Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). In this comparative study, we paid particular attention to establish quantitatively fair metrics and te ...

2022

Coordinated Path Planning for Surface Acoustic Beacons for Supporting Underwater Localization

Alcherio Martinoli, Anwar Ahmad Quraishi

Accurate localization is one of the biggest challenges in underwater robotics. The primary reasons behind that are unavailability of satellite-based positioning below the surface, and lack of clear features in natural water bodies for visually aided locali ...

2021

Nonlinear Model Predictive Control for Formations of Multi-Rotor Micro Aerial Vehicles: An Experimental Approach

Alcherio Martinoli, Izzet Kagan Erünsal

In a world where the complexity and performance requirements of the tasks requested from micro aerial vehicles are continuously increasing, smooth design and deployment of multi-robot systems are gaining more significance. This paper tackles such challengi ...

Springer2021