CAREER: Multi-robot cooperative tasking through local coordination design

该方案的目的是研究不确定环境下机器人团队之间的协同任务。本研究有四个主要目标：-通过明确设计局部协调，建立多机器人协作任务的形式化理论，以保证给定的全局规范。本研究将讨论控制架构、任务的正式表示、任务分解、可分解性和模块化任务等关键问题。多学科方法结合混合系统，监督控制和自动机理论将被利用。-进一步扩展理论以处理故障和不确定性。本研究将从被动容错控制和主动容错控制两个角度对容错协同任务进行研究。关键问题，如故障检测，可容忍故障模式的表征和动态重构，将从混合和离散事件系统理论的角度来解决。-在实际机器人系统上实施和演示设计方法。本实证研究将在一个由自主无人地面和无人飞行器组成的多机器人试验台上进行。将实施诸如协调的污染检测和遏制方案等原型应用，以说明拟议办法的有效性。-采用有效的教学方法，促进学习，培养年青的工程人才。智力优势：提出的研究解决了集群机器人技术进步的一个基本问题，即如何设计机器人之间的局部协调，以实现某些期望的集体行为。该项目旨在基于控制、计算机科学和机器人等学科的各种模型和方法，开发和演示多机器人合作任务的正式设计理论。提出的理论将通过设计局部协调规则和控制律来保证群集机器人团队的给定全局性能。因此，所提出的方法具有自顶向下和设计正确的性质。因此，它很好地补充了群体机器人中流行的自下而上的设计实践，其中局部交互通常是预先定义的启发式，灵感来自自然社会行为。更广泛的影响：该项目有可能为解决大型分布式动力系统的复杂性提供新的视角，例如传感器执行器网络、电网和运输系统。该研究将有助于促进我们对复杂工程系统的紧急行为与其分布式动态组件之间的局部相互作用之间关系的理解。这种理解对于构建更可靠、更高效的未来工程系统至关重要。特别是，本项目的理论和实践研究可以帮助蜂群机器人看到更多的实际应用，如协调环境监测，应急响应和执法。此外，本科生和研究生将参与支持该项目的测试平台和算法开发。

The objective of the proposal is to study cooperative tasking among teams of robots under uncertain environments. The research has four main objectives:- To develop a formal theory of multi-robot cooperative tasking to guarantee given global specifications through explicitly designing local coordination. This study will address key issues such as control architectures, formal representations of tasks, task decomposition, decomposability, and modular tasking. Multidisciplinary approaches combining hybrid systems, supervisory control, and automata theory will be utilized.- To further extend the theory to handle faults and uncertainty. This study will investigate the fault tolerant cooperative tasking from the perspectives of both passive fault tolerance and active fault tolerant control. The key issues, such as fault detection, characterization of tolerable fault patterns and dynamic reconfiguration, will be addressed from the hybrid and discrete event system theory point of view.- To implement and demonstrate the design methods on real robotic systems. This empirical study will be conducted on a multi-robot testbed consisting of both autonomous unmanned ground and aerial vehicles. Prototype applications, such as a coordinated pollution detection and containment scenario, will be implemented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.- To use effective pedagogy in teaching so as to promote learning and foster young talents in engineering.Intellectual Merits: The proposed research addresses a fundamental question essential for advancements in swarming robotics, namely how to design local coordination among robots so as to achieve certain desired collective behaviors. This project seeks to develop and demonstrate a formal design theory for multi-robot cooperative tasking based on a variety of models and approaches from disciplines like control, computer sciences and robotics. The proposed theory will guarantee a given global performance from a team of swarming robots through designing their local coordination rules and control laws. Thus, the proposed method is of a top-down and correct-by-design nature. It therefore complements well the prevailing bottom-up design practices in swarming robotics, where the local interactions are usually predefined heuristically with inspirations from natural social behaviors.Broader Impacts: The project has potential to provide a new perspective in tackling the complexity of large-scale distributed dynamical systems, such as sensor actuator networks, power grids and transportation systems. The study will help to advance our understanding of the relationship between emergent behaviors from a complex engineered system and local interactions among its distributed dynamical components. This understanding is critical to building more reliable and efficient future engineered systems. In particular, the theoretical and practical studies in this project may help swarming robotics to see more real applications, such as coordinated environment monitoring, emergency response, and law enforcement. Furthermore, undergraduate and graduate students will be engaged to support the project's testbed and algorithm developments.