CAREER: Multi-robot cooperative tasking through local coordination design

职业：通过局部协调设计进行多机器人协作任务

• 批准号: 1253488
• 负责人: Hai Lin
• 金额: $ 40万
• 依托单位: University of Notre Dame
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-03-01 至 2019-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1253488&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Multi; robot; cooperative; tasking

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.

该提案的目的是研究不确定环境下机器人团队之间的合作任务。这项研究具有四个主要目标： - 开发一种多机器人合作任务的形式理论，以通过明确设计本地协调来确保给定全球规格。这项研究将解决关键问题，例如控制体系结构，任务的正式表示，任务分解，可分解性和模块化任务。将利用结合混合系统，监督控制和自动机理论的多学科方法。-为了进一步扩展理论以处理故障和不确定性。这项研究将从被动容错和主动容错控制的角度研究容错的合作任务。关键问题，例如故障检测，可容忍故障模式的表征和动态重新配置，将从混合和离散事件系统理论的观点中解决。这项实证研究将在由自动无人机和航空车辆组成的多机器人测试床上进行。 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行为。该项目旨在根据控制，计算机科学和机器人技术等学科的各种模型和方法来开发和演示多机器人合作任务的形式设计理论。拟议的理论将通过设计其当地协调规则和控制法律来保证一群蜂群机器人团队的全球性能。因此，所提出的方法具有自上而下且正确设计的性质。因此，它很好地补充了蜂拥而至的机器人技术中普遍的自下而上的设计实践，在这种情况下，当地的互动通常是通过自然社交行为的灵感来预定的。Broader的影响：该项目具有潜力，可以提供新的观点来解决大规模的动态系统的复杂性，例如传感器Actuator网络，例如传感器Actuer网络和电源网络，电源网，电网和运输系统。这项研究将有助于提高我们对复杂工程系统的新兴行为与其分布式动态组件之间的局部相互作用之间的关系的理解。这种理解对于建立更可靠，更有效的未来工程系统至关重要。特别是，该项目的理论和实践研究可能有助于蜂拥而至的机器人技术，以查看更多的真实应用，例如协调的环境监测，应急响应和执法。此外，本科生和研究生将订婚，以支持该项目的测试床和算法开发。