33 research outputs found
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
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
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
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
Specification-Based Task Orchestration for Multi-Robot Aerial Teams
As humans begin working more frequently in environments with multi-agent systems, they are presented with challenges on how to control these systems in an intuitive manner. Current approaches tend to limit either the interaction ability of the user or limit the expressive capacity of instructions given to the robots. Applications that utilize temporal logics provide a human-readable syntax for systems that ensures formal guarantees for specification completion. By providing a modality for global task specification, we seek to reduce cognitive load and allow for high-level objectives to be communicated to a multi-agent system. In addition to this, we also seek to expand the capabilities of swarms to understand desired actions via interpretable commands retrieved from a human.
In this thesis, we first present a method for specification-based control of a quadrotor. We utilize quadrotors as a highly agile and maneuverable application platform that has a wide variety of uses in complex problem domains. Leveraging specification-based control allows us to formulate a specification-based planning framework that will be utilized throughout the thesis. We then present methods for creating systems which allows us to provide task decomposition, allocation and planning for a team of quadrotors defined as task orchestration of multi-robot systems. Next, the task allocation portion of the task orchestration work is extended in the online case by considering cost agnostic sampling of trajectories from an online optimization problem. Then, we will introduce learning techniques where temporal logic specifications are learned and generated from a set of user given traces. Finally, we will conclude this thesis by presenting an extension to the Robotarium through hardware and software modifications that provides remote users access to control aerial swarms.Ph.D
Past, Present, Future: A Comprehensive Exploration of AI Use Cases in the UMBRELLA IoT Testbed
UMBRELLA is a large-scale, open-access Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem
incorporating over 200 multi-sensor multi-wireless nodes, 20 collaborative
robots, and edge-intelligence-enabled devices. This paper provides a guide to
the implemented and prospective artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities of
UMBRELLA in real-world IoT systems. Four existing UMBRELLA applications are
presented in detail: 1) An automated streetlight monitoring for detecting
issues and triggering maintenance alerts; 2) A Digital twin of building
environments providing enhanced air quality sensing with reduced cost; 3) A
large-scale Federated Learning framework for reducing communication overhead;
and 4) An intrusion detection for containerised applications identifying
malicious activities. Additionally, the potential of UMBRELLA is outlined for
future smart city and multi-robot crowdsensing applications enhanced by
semantic communications and multi-agent planning. Finally, to realise the above
use-cases we discuss the need for a tailored MLOps platform to automate
UMBRELLA model pipelines and establish trust.Comment: 6 pgaes, 4 figures. This work has been accepted by PerCom TrustSense
workshop 202
Formation Control of Nonholonomic Multi-Agent Systems
This dissertation is concerned with the formation control problem of multiple agents modeled as nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots. Both kinematic and dynamic robot models are considered. Solutions are presented for a class of formation problems that include formation, maneuvering, and flocking. Graph theory and nonlinear systems theory are the key tools used in the design and stability analysis of the proposed control schemes. Simulation and/or experimental results are presented to illustrate the performance of the controllers.
In the first part, we present a leader-follower type solution to the formation maneuvering problem. The solution is based on the graph that models the coordination among the robots being a spanning tree. Our control law incorporates two types of position errors: individual tracking errors and coordination errors for leader-follower pairs in the spanning tree. The control ensures that the robots globally acquire a given planar formation while the formation as a whole globally tracks a desired trajectory, both with uniformly ultimately bounded errors. The control law is first designed at the kinematic level and then extended to the dynamic level. In the latter, we consider that parametric uncertainty exists in the equations of motion. These uncertainties are accounted for by employing an adaptive control scheme.
In the second part, we design a distance-based control scheme for the flocking of the nonholonomic agents under the assumption that the desired flocking velocity is known to all agents. The control law is designed at the kinematic level and is based on the rigidity properties of the graph modeling the sensing/control interactions among the robots. A simple input transformation is used to facilitate the control design by converting the nonholonomic model into the single-integrator equation. The resulting control ensures exponential convergence to the desired formation while the formation maneuvers according to a desired, time-varying translational velocity.
In the third part, we extend the previous flocking control framework to the case where only a subset of the agents know the desired flocking velocity. The resulting controllers include distributed observers to estimate the unknown quantities. The theory of interconnected systems is used to analyze the stability of the observer-controller system