Akshaya Agrawal

2025

1. OCEANS

   Underwater Multi-Robot Simulation and Motion Planning in Angler

   Akshaya Agrawal, Evan Palmer, Zachary Kingston, and Geoffrey A. Hollinger

   In IEEE/MTS OCEANS Conference

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   Deploying multi-robot systems in underwater environments is expensive and lengthy; testing algorithms and software in simulation improves development by decoupling software and hardware. However, this requires a simulation framework that closely resembles the real-world. Angler is an open-source framework that simulates low-level communication protocols for an onboard autopilot, such as ArduSub, providing a framework that is close to reality, but unfortunately lacking support for simulating multiple robots. We present an extension to Angler that supports multi-robot simulation and motion planning. Our extension has a modular architecture that creates non-conflicting communication channels between Gazebo, ArduSub Software-in-the-Loop (SITL), and MAVROS to operate multiple robots simultaneously in the same environment. Our multi-robot motion planning module interfaces with cascaded controllers via a JointTrajectory controller in ROS 2. We also provide an integration with the Open Motion Planning Library (OMPL), a collision avoidance module, and tools for procedural environment generation. Our work enables the development and benchmarking of underwater multi-robot motion planning in dynamic environments.

   @inproceedings{agrawal2025mrangler,
     title = {Underwater Multi-Robot Simulation and Motion Planning in Angler},
     author = {Agrawal, Akshaya and Palmer, Evan and Kingston, Zachary and Hollinger, Geoffrey A.},
     year = {2025},
     booktitle = {IEEE/MTS OCEANS Conference},
     address = {Brest, France},
     pages = {1--6},
     doi = {10.1109/OCEANS58557.2025.11104649},
   }

2. ICRA

   Constrained Nonlinear Kaczmarz Projection on Intersections of Manifolds for Coordinated Multi-Robot Mobile Manipulation

   Akshaya Agrawal, Parker Mayer, Zachary Kingston, and Geoffrey A. Hollinger

   In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation

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   Cooperative manipulation tasks impose various structure-, task-, and robot-specific constraints on mobile manipulators. However, current methods struggle to model and solve these myriad constraints simultaneously. We propose a twofold solution: first, we model constraints as a family of manifolds amenable to simultaneous solving. Second, we introduce the constrained nonlinear Kaczmarz (cNKZ) projection technique to produce constraint-satisfying solutions. Experiments show that cNKZ dramatically outperforms baseline approaches, which cannot find solutions at all. We integrate cNKZ with a sampling-based motion planning algorithm to generate complex, coordinated motions for 3 to 6 mobile manipulators (18–36 DoF), with cNKZ solving up to 80 nonlinear constraints simultaneously and achieving up to a 92% success rate in cluttered environments. We also demonstrate our approach on hardware using three Turtlebot3 Waffle Pi robots with OpenMANIPULATOR-X arms.

   @inproceedings{agrawal2025cnkz,
     title = {Constrained Nonlinear {Kaczmarz} Projection on Intersections of Manifolds for Coordinated Multi-Robot Mobile Manipulation},
     author = {Agrawal, Akshaya and Mayer, Parker and Kingston, Zachary and Hollinger, Geoffrey A.},
     year = {2025},
     booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation},
     pages = {7726--7732},
     doi = {10.1109/ICRA55743.2025.11127991},
   }