Collaborative Research: Safe Coordination of Multiple Autonomous Vehicles

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The focus of the project is on developing methods for safe coordination of groups of multiple vehicles accomplishing multiple tasks in the presence of a variety of physical, collision avoidance, and informational constraints. Safe coordination assumes the accomplishment of the vehicles? individual and group goals while never violating the overall multi-vehicle system?s safety. Coordination of multiple vehicles is considered safe if there is a guarantee of no collisions between the vehicles and between the vehicles and static objects. The individual and group goals are defined based on numerous applications including surveillance and reconnaissance, control of mobile sensor networks, manipulation of static objects using mobile robots, and air and highway traffic control, to name a few. The main deliverable of this project is to provide methodologies that would lead to implementable control laws for coordination of a variety of vehicles in the presence of safety, motion, and communication constraints. The theoretical results will be tested on a number of experimental vehicle platforms. The benefits of successfully accomplishing this project are numerous. Implications of providing safe coordination laws for ground and air traffic regulations as well as for numerous applications of groups of unmanned vehicles are of crucial importance, the first and the foremost being the safety of humans involved. The benefits also include a decrease in cost due to collision avoidance and the reliability of accomplishing desired goals using groups of autonomous vehicles by assuming realistic models. Graduate and undergraduate students would benefit from investigating problems that are theoretically challenging with many useful application opportunities. Demonstrations using multiple autonomous robots will be presented to K-12 students in order to introduce them to exciting opportunities that engineering as a profession can offer.