The objective of this project is to investigate a set of control and communication techniques for establishing and maintaining communication connections among multiple collaborating mobile robots, in response to varying communication conditions in practice, to ensure robust and flexible multi-robot coordination. The approach is to exploit the features of wireless communications and mobility of robots to significantly increase the coverage and reliability of communications and the chance of forming communication links among mobile robots.
Intellectual merit: This research addresses the critical challenge in the establishment and maintenance of communication connections among collaborative mobile robots, which is imposed by unstable communication conditions and the dynamic nature of robots and environments. The intellectual merit lies in the transformative development and integration of novel distributed control and communication techniques for controlled communications, multi-robot motion, and wireless signal search under unstable communication conditions and robot/task constraints. The integrated application of these techniques will lead to robust and efficient communication networking, high-freedom task operation and exploration, and thus highly robust and flexible coordination among multiple collaborative robots.
Broader impacts: The broader impacts include 1) facilitating numerous applications of multi-robot systems by solving the fundamental problem of establishing and maintaining robust communication connectivity among robots, and providing a foundation to various research topics based on it; 2) developing new course materials and training graduate and undergraduate students in a cross-disciplinary context; 3) providing research opportunities to high school students and to K-12 teachers and community college faculty, and encouraging students to set their career goals in engineering and science.
