CRII: RI: Distributed, Stable and Robust Topology Control: New Methods for Asymmetrically Interacting Multi-Robot Teams

近年来，自主机器人在研究和工业的关键领域迅速增加。然而，机器人团队的自主性在某种程度上仍处于起步阶段。因此，本项目旨在消除目前限制多机器人团队自主控制的三个假设：(1)所有机器人在任何时候都可以获得完整的系统信息；(2)机器人与机器人之间的互动在团队成员之间是对称的（即，我看到你，你看到我）；(3)机器人之间的相互作用提供了足够的信息，以保证机器人运动的可预测性和安全性。该项目将通过开发新的方法来解决这些限制，当上述假设不存在时，明确控制机器人与机器人之间的交互，并使用商用现成的机器人和物联网（IoT）传感器平台进行现场实验验证。项目成果将广泛应用于智能交通、精准农业、自主建筑和国防等领域，同时允许在实验室之外进行更深入的实验。最后，该项目包括一个全面的外展计划，包括：(1)为代表性不足的学生提供K-12学术体验；(2)研究生课程；(3)对机器人社区的开源贡献。为了实现上述目标，本项目将交叉控制和图论的新技术，以获得一类新的非对称拓扑控制律的稳定性保证。理论方法将使大规模分布式多机器人系统的协调得到保证。具体而言，该项目将重点关注以下发展目标：(1)非线性运动控制器，保证多机器人稳定协调，以识别一类不对称机器人交互；(2)用于确定非对称通信和感知拓扑中稳定转换的分布式算法；(3)硬件安全控制输入的扩展和对外部干扰的鲁棒性；(4)空中和地面机器人的现场实验，以及目标跟踪制度下的物联网传感器网络。

Recent years have seen a rapid increase of autonomous robotics in critical segments of research and industry. However, autonomy in teams of robots remains somewhat in its infancy. This project therefore aims to eliminate three assumptions that currently limit the autonomous control of multi-robot teams: (1) that complete system information is available to all robots at all times; (2) that robot-to-robot interactions are symmetric among team members (i.e., I see you and you see me); and (3) that interactions among robots provide enough information to guarantee predictable and safe robot motion. This project will tackle such restrictions by developing new methods for explicitly controlling robot-to-robot interaction when the above assumptions are absent, with validation in field experiments using commercial off-the-shelf robotic and Internet of Things (IoT) sensor platforms. The project outcomes will find broad relevance in applications spanning intelligent transportation, precision agriculture, autonomous construction, and defense, while allowing for deeper experimentation outside of laboratories. Finally, the project includes a comprehensive outreach plan consisting of: (1) K-12 academic experiences for underrepresented students; (2) graduate curriculum; and (3) open-source contributions to the robotics community.Towards the above goals, this project will intersect novel techniques from control and graph theory to derive stability guarantees for a new class of asymmetric topology control laws. The theoretical approaches will enable guaranteed coordination for a large class of distributed multi-robot systems. Specifically, this project will focus on the following objectives of developing: (1) nonlinear motion controllers that guarantee stable multi-robot coordination for an identified class of asymmetric robot interactions; (2) distributed algorithms for determining stable transitions in asymmetric communication and sensing topologies; (3) extensions for hardware safe control inputs and robustness to external disturbance; and (4) field experiments with aerial and ground robots, and an IoT sensor network in a target tracking regime.