The objective of the proposal is to study cooperative tasking among teams of robots under uncertain environments. The research has four main objectives: - To develop a formal theory of multi-robot cooperative tasking to guarantee given global specifications through explicitly designing local coordination. This study will address key issues such as control architectures, formal representations of tasks, task decomposition, decomposability, and modular tasking. Multidisciplinary approaches combining hybrid systems, supervisory control, and automata theory will be utilized. - To further extend the theory to handle faults and uncertainty. This study will investigate the fault tolerant cooperative tasking from the perspectives of both passive fault tolerance and active fault tolerant control. The key issues, such as fault detection, characterization of tolerable fault patterns and dynamic reconfiguration, will be addressed from the hybrid and discrete event system theory point of view. - To implement and demonstrate the design methods on real robotic systems. This empirical study will be conducted on a multi-robot testbed consisting of both autonomous unmanned ground and aerial vehicles. Prototype applications, such as a coordinated pollution detection and containment scenario, will be implemented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. - To use effective pedagogy in teaching so as to promote learning and foster young talents in engineering.

Intellectual Merits: The proposed research addresses a fundamental question essential for advancements in swarming robotics, namely how to design local coordination among robots so as to achieve certain desired collective behaviors. This project seeks to develop and demonstrate a formal design theory for multi-robot cooperative tasking based on a variety of models and approaches from disciplines like control, computer sciences and robotics. The proposed theory will guarantee a given global performance from a team of swarming robots through designing their local coordination rules and control laws. Thus, the proposed method is of a top-down and correct-by-design nature. It therefore complements well the prevailing bottom-up design practices in swarming robotics, where the local interactions are usually predefined heuristically with inspirations from natural social behaviors.

Broader Impacts: The project has potential to provide a new perspective in tackling the complexity of large-scale distributed dynamical systems, such as sensor actuator networks, power grids and transportation systems. The study will help to advance our understanding of the relationship between emergent behaviors from a complex engineered system and local interactions among its distributed dynamical components. This understanding is critical to building more reliable and efficient future engineered systems. In particular, the theoretical and practical studies in this project may help swarming robotics to see more real applications, such as coordinated environment monitoring, emergency response, and law enforcement. Furthermore, undergraduate and graduate students will be engaged to support the project's testbed and algorithm developments.

Project Start
Project End
Budget Start
2013-03-01
Budget End
2019-02-28
Support Year
Fiscal Year
2012
Total Cost
$400,000
Indirect Cost
Name
University of Notre Dame
Department
Type
DUNS #
City
Notre Dame
State
IN
Country
United States
Zip Code
46556