CAREER: Generalizations in Obstacle Avoidance Theory

该项目开发了一个理论框架，能够对避障制导规律进行分析表征，同时对这些规律进行实验验证。这具有重要的意义，因为避障问题是路径规划问题的重要组成部分，路径规划问题出现在机器人、自主空中、地面和水下机器人、计算机动画、分子运动、自主轮椅、航天器避开空间碎片、机器人手术、盲人辅助工具等不同领域。所设计的导引律特别适用于在复杂的动态环境中实时实施精确的路径规划，例如包含机器人机械手、人形机器人、编队飞行的车辆和其他高维空间，其中智能体对其环境没有先验信息。对设计的导引律对传感器噪声、数据延迟和数据丢失等各种不确定性进行了鲁棒性分析，并进行了实验验证，其中导引律在微控制器平台上以节省资源的方式编码，并在小型机器人地面和空中飞行器上实现。预期结果包括适用于高维随机环境中移动的各种形状(可能是时变的)障碍物的避碰的导引律，以及这些导引律的安全保证的假设。该项目还开展了多项外展活动，并引入了促进机器人教育和应用的新课程，这些活动从K-12开始，一直进行到本科和研究生水平的工程教育。

This project develops a theoretical framework that enables an analytical characterization of guidance laws for obstacle avoidance, accompanied by an experimental validation of these laws. This has significant implications since the obstacle avoidance problem is an important component of the path planning problem, which appears in several diverse fields including robotics, autonomous air, ground and underwater vehicles, computer animation, molecular motion, autonomous wheelchairs, spacecraft avoiding space debris, robotic surgery, assistance aids for the blind, etc. The guidance laws designed are particularly applicable for real-time implementation of precise path planning in cluttered dynamic environments such as those containing robot manipulators, humanoid robots, vehicles flying in formation and other high-dimensional spaces wherein the agents have no a priori information about their environment. A robustness analysis of the designed guidance laws to various uncertainties such as sensor noise, data delays and data dropouts is performed, followed by an experimental validation wherein the guidance laws are coded on microcontroller platforms in a resource-efficient manner and implemented on small-scale robotic ground and air vehicles. The expected results include guidance laws suitable for collision avoidance of obstacles of various, possibly time-varying, shapes moving in high-dimensional stochastic environments, along with a postulation of the safety guarantees of these guidance laws. This project also performs multiple outreach activities and introduces new curriculum that promote the education and applications of robotics, and these activities are conducted in levels starting from K-12 all the way through undergraduate and graduate level engineering education.