MRI: Development of a Mobile Robot Instrument Cluster

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This project, exploring the coordinated navigation and task-oriented control of a cluster of mobile robots, develops a capable, flexible, and maintainable testbed. This system enables the Development of an experimental demonstration of novel, robust, & high-precision multi-robot capabilities, Ability to integrate alternate subsystem-level innovations and to support their comparative validation, Expansion of testbed access to graduate students from several engineering departments, and Inclusion of the testbed in a variety of educational classes/projects and outreach/exhibition activities.The infrastructure consists of homogeneous, distributed, mobile instruments that exploit real-time cooperation in order to improve the cost-effectiveness of tasks and/or to enable entirely new capabilities. In order to support the rapid reconfiguration of system resources and the logging of appropriate experimental data, the project develops a flexible architecture integrated with acquired hardware components. The capabilities of the system supports research in the design and control of multi-robot systems for diverse applications ranging from distributed in situ/remote sensing to distributed object manipulation/transportation. The flexible nature of the system allows exploring innovations in centralized/decentralized control and communication, local or remote human-in-the loop vs. automated control, absolute vs. relative sensing, etc.