CAREER: Solar-Powered Unmanned Aerial and Ground Vehicles for Long-Term Operation in Dynamic Environments

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Current technology in solar-powered robotic systems is limited to homogeneous robots that act independently within the constraints of their design and are subject to power limitations and inability to intelligently adapt to changeable situations. These limitations prevent the widespread adoption of solar robots in applications. This career project proposes a transformative approach to the development of next generation solar-powered robotic systems that overcome these limitations. An innovative strategy will integrate heterogeneous aerial and ground vehicle operations in order to accomplish long-duration high-efficiency missions, improve adaptability to dynamic environments, and enable the effective use of environmental but variable energy sources. Results of this work will enable societally-important technological advancements in environmental monitoring, search and rescue, surveillance, and agriculture, which will contribute to U.S. economic vitality, public health, and security. This research also provides necessary insights into general robotics applications pertaining to alleviating the dependence of robotic missions on non-renewable energy sources during long-duration operations. The use and application of solar-powered robots increases the demand for high-quality photovoltaic products, which will subsequently boost development in related technologies. This work will incorporate a hierarchy of educational activities appropriate to different groups of students, from the general public to more advanced scholars. These activities include a synergy-based education platform, industry-oriented training projects, and educational open-source software for a solar robot. In collaboration with the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research team at Iowa State University, the PI will provide public visitors, especially community college and K-12 students, with access to robotic systems.The research will contribute to a novel paradigm enabling experimentation on energy-aware long-duration autonomous multi-platform systems. Establishing advanced autonomy in solar-powered robotic systems will be accomplished by leveraging interdisciplinary methodologies in the fields of dynamic networks, distributed control, and convex optimization, and by developing novel strategies for coordinating and controlling heterogeneous aerial and ground vehicles toward mission accomplishment. These multidisciplinary methodologies will be consistently integrated to yield a new paradigm for modeling, optimization, and distributed control of solar-powered robotic systems. The project will systematically infuse solar energy into a demanding technological area, namely robotic systems, with specific applications to wide-area long-duration operations. The proposed optimization and control schemes will address fundamental problems of multi-agent dynamical systems whose performance can be improved by cooperation among internal agents.