- Contact Person: Milan Rollo
- Key Partner / Sponsorship: CAK
- Years: 2006 -
This work was done in cooperation with the Intelligent and Mobile Robotics Group.
Collective robotics becomes a very important area of research nowdays. In the past robots were usually teleoperated or only a single autonomous robot was operating in the environment. At present as robots become more cost-effective, easier to maintain and the communication infrastructure has improved, situation drives towards wider use of robotic teams.
These teams may consist of number of heterogenous mobile robots, static sensors and even a humans. As humans more and more rely on hardware robots, it is necessary to develop robust and reliable control algorithms.
Software agents and multiagent systems are often used to simulate the behavior of the distributed systems. These simulations allow to adjust parameters of the simulated environments, control the communication accessibility, simulate high number of robots (scalability tests) and are faster and cheaper then real world experiments.
Within the collective robotics research effort we work on following projects:
- NAIMT (Naval Automation and Information Management Technology) project provides simulation environment for the underwater surveillance and propose architecture of control part of autonomous robot capable of efficient operation in such environment. Besides this the algorithms for decentralized coordination within a group of such robots and video stream transmission path planning were developed. Development of these algorithms was necessary due to the nature of environment, where individual robots can become temporarily inaccessible.
- Center of Applied Cybernetics
Software simulation however can not be so complex to cover all situations and problems that can occure in real world environment. In cooperation with the Intelligent Mobile Robotics group (part of the Gerstner lab) we are working on the development of a framwork that will allow us to verify the functionallity of algorithms that control the team of autonomous robots. These algorithms are originally developed for multiagent systems and their deployment on hardware robots should allow us to further improve their stability and robustness. In this project we are currently working on problems of collision avoidance and multirobot exploration.
Collective Robotics Screenshots
