The Robotarium: A remotely accessible swarm robotics research testbed

This paper describes 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-robot 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 and discusses the considerations one must take when making complex hardware remotely accessible. In particular, safety must be built into the system already at the design phase without overly constraining what coordinated control programs users can upload and execute, which calls for minimally invasive safety routines with provable performance guarantees

Riemannian consensus for manifolds with bounded curvature

Consensus algorithms are popular distributed algorithms for computing aggregate quantities, such as averages, in ad-hoc wireless networks. However, existing algorithms mostly address the case where the measurements lie in Euclidean space. In this work we propose Riemannian consensus, a natural extension of existing averaging consensus algorithms to the case of Riemannian manifolds. Unlike previous generalizations, our algorithm is intrinsic and, in principle, can be applied to any complete Riemannian manifold. We give sufficient convergence conditions on Riemannian manifolds with bounded curvature and we analyze the differences with respect to the Euclidean case. We test the proposed algorithms on synthetic data sampled from the space of rotations, the sphere and the Grassmann manifold.This work was supported by the grant NSF CNS-0834470. Recommended by Associate Editor L. Schenato. (CNS-0834470 - NSF

Task space consensus in networks of heterogeneous and uncertain robotic systems with variable time-delays

This work deals with the leader-follower and the leaderless consensus problems in networks of multiple robot manipulators. The robots are non-identical, kinematically different (heterogeneous), and their physical parameters are uncertain. The main contribution of this work is a novel controller that solves the two consensus problems, in the task space, with the following features: it estimates the kinematic and the dynamic physical parameters; it is robust to interconnecting variable-time delays; it employs the singularity-free unit-quaternions to represent the orientation; and, using energy-like functions, the controller synthesis follows a constructive procedure. Simulations using a network with four heterogeneous manipulators illustrate the performance of the proposed controller.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft