Engineering Resilient Swarm Robotics Systems

工程弹性群体机器人系统

• 批准号: RGPIN-2019-05165
• 负责人: Beltrame, Giovanni
• 金额: $ 2.04万
• 依托单位: École Polytechnique de Montréal
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2022-01-01 至 2023-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=754186
• 关键词: Engineering; Resilient; Swarm; Robotics; Systems

Multi-robot systems (a.k.a. `swarms') are becoming pervasive. Although recent technological advancements demonstrate their potential in transportation, manufacturing, medical systems, and disaster response, numerous challenges must be addressed to safely realize their potential. During the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, for example, a swarm of robots with heterogeneous capability (e.g. flying vs. driving) could have been used to assess the scale of the disaster, locate people in danger, and provide a robust communication network for responders. Unfortunately, these functions are not possible with current technology; how to engineer collective behavior and assure safety and resilience of robot swarms, particularly in challenging and unpredictable real-world conditions, are open research problems. Robotics, artificial intelligence, and the Internet-of-Things are driving current research for the technology sector, and multi-robot systems are one of the main topics. However, current software standards for critical systems (e.g. industrial and aerospace) are not directly applicable to distributed systems which exhibit emergence - i.e. collective behaviour that is not apparent from a single robot's code. We believe that detecting and correcting issues specific to emergent systems during development should be an integral part of system design. Furthermore, we consider how swarms' behaviour and goals could be updated during missions to adapt to changes in the environment or priorities. In this research program, we propose to address these issues along 3 lines of research: Aim I) Engineer resilient collective behavior in robot swarms: we will define the theoretical foundations that allow swarms to perceive problems and adapt appropriately; Aim II) Embed safety primitives in the Buzz programming language: we will verify safety properties of collective systems during the development phase Aim III) Develop software management strategies for large robot teams: we will study novel methods for deploying and releasing software revisions to deployed robotic networks, considering their very peculiar requirements in terms of mobility and resources Overall, this research will lead to practical swarm-robotics applications. We envision disaster response (in situations such as the Fort McMurray fire) as a first demonstration of our systems, where robots are deployed and provide constant situation monitoring, assist in victim search, and provide a communication infrastructure in a fully-autonomous, self-adaptive way, with minimal human supervision.

多机器人系统（又称“群”正在变得普遍。尽管最近的技术进步证明了它们在运输、制造、医疗系统和灾害响应方面的潜力，但必须解决许多挑战才能安全地实现它们的潜力。例如，在2016年麦克默里堡野火期间，一群具有不同能力（例如飞行与驾驶）的机器人本可以用于评估灾难的规模，定位处于危险中的人员，并为响应者提供强大的通信网络。不幸的是，这些功能在当前的技术下是不可能的;如何设计集体行为并确保机器人群的安全性和弹性，特别是在具有挑战性和不可预测的现实世界条件下，是开放的研究问题。机器人技术、人工智能和物联网正在推动技术领域的当前研究，多机器人系统是主要课题之一。然而，目前的软件标准的关键系统（如工业和航空航天）是不直接适用于分布式系统表现出的新兴-即集体行为，这是不明显的，从一个单一的机器人的代码。我们认为，在开发过程中检测和纠正紧急系统特有的问题应该是系统设计的一个组成部分。此外，我们考虑如何群的行为和目标可以在任务期间更新，以适应环境或优先级的变化。 在这项研究计划中，我们建议沿着沿着3条研究路线解决这些问题：目标I）在机器人群中设计弹性集体行为：我们将定义允许群感知问题并适当适应的理论基础;目标II）在Buzz编程语言中嵌入安全原语：我们将在开发阶段验证集体系统的安全属性目标III）为大型机器人团队开发软件管理策略：我们将研究新的方法来部署和发布软件修订部署机器人网络，考虑到他们的移动性和资源方面的非常特殊的要求。总的来说，这项研究将导致实际的群体机器人应用。我们设想灾难响应（在麦克默里堡火灾等情况下）作为我们系统的第一个演示，其中部署机器人并提供持续的情况监测，协助受害者搜索，并以完全自主，自适应的方式提供通信基础设施，最少的人为监督。