CAREER: Robots for Everyone, Everywhere

日常生活中充斥着计算设备、笔记本电脑、智能手机和许多其他个人和家用电子设备，这使得人们越来越容易找到解决任何计算问题的方法。然而，当谈到现实世界中的物理问题时，个人技术远远落后：典型的用户在日常生活中与机器人的互动往往很少，甚至根本没有。该项目的研究旨在解决未得到满足的需求，创造必要的技术，使机器人像今天的计算一样无处不在；通过使获得机器人创造的机会大众化，减少进入壁垒，我们可以在发展中领域推进技术，为服务不足的社区带来技术进步的机会，并在全国和世界各地激发和鼓励学生继续深造。该项目将创建用户友好的工具，允许任何具有任何背景或专业知识的人设计定制的个性化机器人。这项研究将包括开发新的制造工艺，使所设计的机器人能够按需制造。此外，还将研究新的算法和框架，以扩大对这些设备的分布式网络的自主控制。该项目的目标是让每个人最终都能说，对于任何需要解决的个人物理任务，“有一个机器人可以做到这一点。”拟议的研究计划将从设计、制造和控制三个平行的方面解决个人机器人的理论和系统问题。无处不在的网络物理系统必须提供唯一指定的功能，因此这个项目将研究设计自动化算法，从非专业用户提供的高级任务描述生成可制造的规范，将验证和确认结果反馈到用户在环和自动化优化中。然后，这些设计必须在个人规模的集成机电设备中实现，为此，本研究将探索使用坚固的机械材料和集成的机电超材料进行减法制造的快速制造工具和工艺，并开发用于加法制造的离散微制造有源元件。最后，必须控制这些机器人；该计划将在集成系统级别调查通用通信和控制子任务，利用个人机器人的预期普及性来开发用于分布式定位、通信感知运动规划和移动性增强网络的算法和协议。

The everyday world is pervaded by computational devices laptops, smart phones, and many other personal and household electronic devices make it increasingly easier to find solutions to any computational problem one may have. However when it comes to physical problems in the real world, personal technology lags far behind: typical users often have minimal to no interaction with robots in daily life. The research in this project aims to address unmet needs, creating the technology necessary to make robotics as ubiquitous as computing is today; by democratizing access to robot creation reducing barriers to entry we can advance technology in developing fields, bring opportunities for technical advancement to under-served communities, and excite and encourage students to further their education throughout the country and the world. The project will result in creation of user-friendly tools that allow anyone with any background or expertise to design custom, personalized robots. The research will include development of new fabrication processes that enable the on-demand fabrication of the designed robots. Also, new algorithms and frameworks will be investigated for expanding autonomous control of distributed networks of these devices. The goal of the project is for everyone to eventually be able to say, for any personal physical task that needs to be solved, "there's a robot for that."The proposed research plan will address theory and systems issues under the three parallel thrusts of design, fabrication, and control for pervasive personal robots. Ubiquitous cyber-physical systems must deliver uniquely specified functionality, and so this program will investigate design automation algorithms that generate manufacturable specifications from high-level task descriptions provided by inexpert users, feeding back verification and validation results into user-in-the-loop and automated optimization. These designs must then be realized into integrated electromechanical machines at a personal scale, for which this research will explore rapid manufacturing tools and processes that use robust mechanical materials and integrated electromechanical metamaterials for subtractive manufacturing and develop discrete microfabricated active elements for additive manufacturing. Finally, these robots must be controlled; this program will investigate universal communications and control subtasks at an integrated system level, using the intended ubiquity of personal robots to develop algorithms and protocols for distributed localization, communication-aware motion planning, and mobility-enhanced networking.