CAREER: Hierarchical Abstractions for Planning and Control of Robotic Swarms

机器人群规划和控制的层次抽象Calin Belta由于计算、通信、传感器和执行器技术的最新进展，现在可以建立数百个小型和廉价的地面、空中和水下机器人团队。它们重量轻，易于运输和部署，可以放入小地方。这样的自主代理群提供了对个体故障的增强的鲁棒性，覆盖广泛区域的可能性，并通过并行性提高计算能力。然而，规划和控制这样的大团队的代理有限的通信和计算能力是一个困难的问题，收到了很多关注在过去的decade.为了适应大量的机器人与非平凡的运动学或动力学在复杂的环境中移动，本项目提出了层次抽象。在较低的层次上，连续抽象通过提取一组群的基本特征来降低问题的维度，同时正确地捕获机器人约束。在更高的层次上，离散抽象关注环境的复杂性，并将规划和控制问题从连续系统的无限维世界映射到有限状态自动机的可判定世界。所提出的算法导致HILLS的发展，一个高层次的规范语言群，LARAD，语言机器人自动部署。在这些框架中，机器人的运动计划制定在一个高层次的语言字符串或时序逻辑公式的语言的离散系统捕捉环境的复杂性。HILLS和LARAD作为模拟软件包实现，也用于群集机器人的实验平台。本项目的目的是解决群集问题，解决形状理论和著名的“n体问题”的基本问题，这些问题传统上在理论物理学中研究，并在原子物理学和天体力学等领域得到应用。另一方面，使用一种独特的方法离散抽象，这项工作试图扩大类已知的可判定连续和混合系统。最后，该项目的分层抽象架构通过创建一个框架，其中处理环境复杂性的强大离散算法可以与非平凡机器人动力学的连续控制律无缝结合，为移动的机器人的规划和控制开辟了一个新的方向。到“离散”领域，如形式分析，以及在机器人和生物学之间的边界应用领域。教育计划的重点是通过引入混合系统，系统生物学，几何规划和控制以及生物信息学的研究生和本科生课程，在上述领域之间建立桥梁。它还涉及一系列丰富的外联活动，包括指导高中教师，评判和指导参加机器人竞赛的高中生，以及指导代表性不足的少数民族本科生。

Hierarchical Abstractions for Planning and Control of Robotic SwarmsCalin BeltaAs a result of recent advances in computation, communication, sensor, and actuator technology, it is now possible to build teams of hundreds of small and inexpensive ground, air, and underwater robots. They are light, easy to transport and deploy, and can fit into small places. Such swarms of autonomous agents provide increased robustness to individual failures, the possibility to cover wide regions, and improve computational power through parallelism. However, planning and controlling such large teams of agents with limited communication and computation capabilities is a difficult problem that received a lot of attention in the past decade.To accommodate large numbers of robots with nontrivial kinematics or dynamics moving in complicated environments, this project proposes hierarchical abstractions. At a lower level, continuous abstractions reduce the dimension of the problem by extracting a set of essential features of the swarm, while correctly capturing the robot constraints. At a higher level, discrete abstractions focus on the complexity of the environment and map the planning and control problem from the infinite dimensional world of continuous systems to the decidable world of finite state automata. The proposed algorithms lead to the development of HILLS, a High Level Specification Language for Swarms, and LARAD, a LAnguage for Robot Automated Deployment. In these frameworks, robotic motion plans are formulated in a high level language in terms of strings or temporal logic formulas in the language of a discrete system capturing the complexity of the environment. HILLS and LARAD are implemented as simulation packages and also used in experimental platforms for swarming robotics.While aimed to providing a solution to the swarming problem, this project addresses fundamental issues in shape theory and the well-known "n-body problem," which are traditionally studied in theoretical physics and find applications in areas such as atomic physics and celestial mechanics. On the other hand, using a unique approach to discrete abstractions, this work attempts to enlarge the class of known decidable continuous and hybrid systems. Finally, the hierarchical abstraction architectures of this project open a new direction in planning and control of mobile robots by creating a framework in which powerful discrete algorithms dealing with the complexity of the environment can be seamlessly combined with continuous control laws for nontrivial robot dynamics.This research is highly interdisciplinary, covering topics ranging from traditionally "continuous" areas, such as geometric nonlinear control, to "discrete" areas such as formal analysis, as well as application areas at the boundary between robotics and biology. The educational plan is focused on building bridges among the above areas by introducing graduate and undergraduate courses on Hybrid Systems, Systems Biology, Geometric Planning and Control, and Bioinformatics. It also involves a rich spectrum of outreach activities, including mentoring of high school teachers, judging and advising high school students participating in robotics competitions, and mentoring under-represented minority undergraduate students.