CONCERTS: Coverage Competency-Based Target Search for Heterogeneous Robot Teams

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Review of the article „CONCERTS: Coverage Competency Based Target Search for Heterogeneous Robot Teams“ by authors: Minkyu Kim, Ryan Gupta, Luis Sentis

Shortcomings of the article:

The purpose of the research should be presented at the end of the literature review.

The graphs in figure 4 do not have x and y axis names also need to list the sizes units in the graph axes.

In figure 8 need marked graphs a and b…. and them explanations.

Needs add “Discussions” section. In this section need discuss the results obtained.

In the conclusions must clearly show what problems the researchers have solved and which results are better than the results of other researches. The conclusions should be clear and concise with the numerical values provided to support and justify the results obtained. The presented conclusions are not informative and do not summarize the results. Conclusions need to be rewritten.

Author Response

Thank you for your valuable feedback. We have addressed your concerns and provided responses to your comments in the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Please see the attachment.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thank you for your valuable feedback. We have addressed your concerns and provided responses to your comments in the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

This manuscript deals with the problem of path planning and execution of multi-robot search for a static target in urban and indoor environments with teams of heterogeneous robots. The authors proposed a failure resilient path planning algorithm CONCERTS which could provide resilience in the event of single or multi teammate failure by recomputing global team plans online. It is also demonstrated by simulations and real hardware.

Please find below some comments:

1. The contribution part could be improved. Now the contribution includes metrics, methods, results, and even the validations. Please give the core innovation of this manuscript. The contribution should help the reader to capture the essential innovation of this work.

2. In section 5.3, although the authors mentioned that video demonstrating these scenarios can be found at their project website, the important results such as snapshots of Gazebo simulation and metrics of the proposed method should be given in the manuscript.

3. The conclusion are lack of quantitative metrics. Please supplement the performance metrics of the proposed method against the classical ones. For example, how faster of the proposed method to complete mission compared with the other methods?

Author Response

Thank you for your valuable feedback. We have addressed your concerns and provided responses to your comments in the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The conclusions should be clear and concise with the numerical values provided to support and justify the results obtained. The presented conclusions are not informative and do not summarize the results. Conclusions need to be rewritten.

Author Response

Please refer to the attached response letter. You will be able to find my response for round 2 from the 5th page.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

I really appreciated the hard work of the authors in making a valuable contribution to the research world. Although, the authors re-worked well, but still a few comments to be noted are: 

line: 247-248: re-planning was initialized when a robot loses communication ... 

line 142: is this Figure 1?

line 60-61: Since CONCERT was demonstrated in Figure 3, so I suggest moving these few lines near figure 3.

Still, the figures are away from the text where it was first discussed. I believed that it is difficult to understand a long research article with incorrect position of pictures. We need to scroll down and find the evidence depicted by a picture. Please, show a suitable solution to this comment. 

Section 5.5: Figure 10 was cited before, figure 9 in the text. Please align the figure numbers. 

Algorithm1: although the authors have mentioned Eq7, but at the same time, he needs to define, IG, pk. and similarly, in algorithm 2, define M[nc].

 

 

 

Author Response

Please refer to the attached response letter. You will be able to find my response for round 2 from the 5th page. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf