RI: Small: Dynamic Payload Transport and Manipulation by Teams of Cooperating Mobile Robotic-Cranes

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We seek to investigate the systematic design and dynamic-control of cooperative payload transport and manipulation by teams of semi-autonomous mobile robotic-crane modules. The Intellectual Merit of the proposed research lies in its contribution to the development of design and control theory for general mechanical systems under various restrictions. First, the cooperative systems under consideration require unidirectional control inputs. Second, the proposed research will also contribute to the fundamental design and control theory for multiple nonholonomic systems under physical constraints. Ultimately, the proposed research also provides fundamental understanding of networked robotic systems that must operate in complex, dynamic, and unstructured environments. There is still relatively little work that treats the physical-interactions and physical power-flows within the broad multi-agent-systems literature, which we seek to remedy.The Broader Impacts of this research are in application areas such as cooperative payload transport, technologies to assist first responders at accident scenes, search and rescue applications, and remote scientific studies of many kinds, such as experiments conducted in undersea environments, rain forest environments, or arctic environments. Remote construction, remote cleanup of hazardous environments, land mine search and remote deactivation, are just a few of the numerous applications that may be impacted by semi-autonomous human/robot interaction. In adition, this project will develop courses, tools and the human resource base to conceive, investigate, implement and validate such systems-of-systems. In addition to graduate and undergraduate student training, planned educational initiatives include: (i) developing and integrating a new graduate course in robotics into the curriculum; (ii) creating educational technology curricular modules for encapsulating knowledge and for dissemination, and (iii) outreach within the university, with local high schools and industry and the educational community at large.