Safe, Remote-Access Swarm Robotics Research on the Robotarium

This paper describes the development of the Robotarium -- a remotely accessible, multi-robot research facility. The impetus behind the Robotarium is that multi-robot testbeds constitute an integral and essential part of the multi-agent research cycle, yet they are expensive, complex, and time-consuming to develop, operate, and maintain. These resource constraints, in turn, limit access for large groups of researchers and students, which is what the Robotarium is remedying by providing users with remote access to a state-of-the-art multi-robot test facility. This paper details the design and operation of the Robotarium as well as connects these to the particular considerations one must take when making complex hardware remotely accessible. In particular, safety must be built in already at the design phase without overly constraining which coordinated control programs the users can upload and execute, which calls for minimally invasive safety routines with provable performance guarantees.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, 3 code samples, 72 reference

Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks

In this chapter, we present a literature survey of an emerging, cutting-edge, and multi-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of Robotics and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) which we refer to as Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks (RWSN). We define a RWSN as an autonomous networked multi-robot system that aims to achieve certain sensing goals while meeting and maintaining certain communication performance requirements, through cooperative control, learning and adaptation. While both of the component areas, i.e., Robotics and WSN, are very well-known and well-explored, there exist a whole set of new opportunities and research directions at the intersection of these two fields which are relatively or even completely unexplored. One such example would be the use of a set of robotic routers to set up a temporary communication path between a sender and a receiver that uses the controlled mobility to the advantage of packet routing. We find that there exist only a limited number of articles to be directly categorized as RWSN related works whereas there exist a range of articles in the robotics and the WSN literature that are also relevant to this new field of research. To connect the dots, we first identify the core problems and research trends related to RWSN such as connectivity, localization, routing, and robust flow of information. Next, we classify the existing research on RWSN as well as the relevant state-of-the-arts from robotics and WSN community according to the problems and trends identified in the first step. Lastly, we analyze what is missing in the existing literature, and identify topics that require more research attention in the future

Collaboration in Social Networks

The very notion of social network implies that linked individuals interact repeatedly with each other. This allows them not only to learn successful strategies and adapt to them, but also to condition their own behavior on the behavior of others, in a strategic forward looking manner. Game theory of repeated games shows that these circumstances are conducive to the emergence of collaboration in simple games of two players. We investigate the extension of this concept to the case where players are engaged in a local contribution game and show that rationality and credibility of threats identify a class of Nash equilibria -- that we call "collaborative equilibria" -- that have a precise interpretation in terms of sub-graphs of the social network. For large network games, the number of such equilibria is exponentially large in the number of players. When incentives to defect are small, equilibria are supported by local structures whereas when incentives exceed a threshold they acquire a non-local nature, which requires a "critical mass" of more than a given fraction of the players to collaborate. Therefore, when incentives are high, an individual deviation typically causes the collapse of collaboration across the whole system. At the same time, higher incentives to defect typically support equilibria with a higher density of collaborators. The resulting picture conforms with several results in sociology and in the experimental literature on game theory, such as the prevalence of collaboration in denser groups and in the structural hubs of sparse networks