RI: Medium Collaborative Research: Minimalist Mapping and Monitoring

“这个奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案(公法111-5)资助的。”这个项目解决了机器人系统中常见的基本和具有挑战性的问题，这些系统建立了自己的地图并解决了监控任务。特别是，当人们试图设计最小成本和最大健壮性的系统时，这项工作有助于我们对传感、控制和计算之间的相互作用的一般理解。在这项工作中，正在开发强大的新的抽象、规划算法和控制规律来完成基本的测绘和监控操作。预计这将在许多以测绘和单轴扫描为基本组成部分的环境中带来技术改进。技术挑战提供了充足的动力，涉及搜索、跟踪和监控人类、野生动物和机器人的行为。例如，搜救、安全扫荡、绘制废弃地雷地图、对濒危物种进行科学研究、辅助生活、地面军事行动，甚至购物习惯分析。这项工作特别具有变革性，因为它超越了算法、计算几何、传感器网络、控制理论和机器人学的传统界限。此外，国家利益继续朝着开发结合了传感、驱动和计算的分布式机器人系统的方向发展。通过帮助打破传统的学术和科学障碍，预计这项工作将改变我们对机器人算法、工程设计过程以及机器人学、计算几何和控制学科学生教育的看法。

"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."This project addresses fundamental and challenging questions that are common to robotic systems that build their own maps and solve monitoring tasks. In particular, the work contributes to our general understanding of the interplay between sensing, control, and computation as people attempt to design systems that minimize costs and maximize robustness.Powerful new abstractions, planning algorithms, and control laws that accomplish basic mapping and monitoring operations are being developed in this effort. This is expected to lead to improved technologies in numerous settings where mapping and monotoring are basic components.Ample motivation is provided by technological challenges that involve searching, tracking, and monitoring the behavior of people, wildlife, and robots. Examples include search-and-rescue, security sweeps, mapping abandoned mines, scientific study of endangered species, assisted living, ground-based military operations, and even analysis of shopping habits. The work is particularly transformative because it lives outside of the traditional boundaries of algorithms, computational geometry, sensor networks, control theory, and robotics. Furthermore, national interest continues to grow in the direction of developing distributed robotic systems that combine sensing, actuation, and computation. By helping to break down traditional academic and scientific barriers, it is expected that the work will transform the way we think about robotics algorithms, the engineering design process, and the education of students across the robotics, computational geometry, and control disciplines.