This project addresses robotics and robotic swarm collaboration. This I-Corps team will explore commercialization of systems of multi-robots that will be transitioned onto swarming, social, educational, programmable, robotic toys. The resulting product, the RoboSPRITE, will form and evolve relationships with other robots, which in turn manifest themselves through different types of coordinated interaction maneuvers. The envisioned project, the RoboSPRITE, has never existed before outside the research lab. As a toy, the robots remember each other, form 'friendships' over time, and adaptively change their behaviors and interaction rules based on the history of their interactions. These interaction rules are moreover programmable, turning the toys into vehicles for learning robotics, coding, mathematics, and even biology since different types of biological herding, hunting, and foraging strategies can be encoded. As such, broader impact can be found in the educational domain, where children will be exposed to STEM concepts in a playful setting.
The intellectual driver behind the proposed educational, robotic toy is research that focuses on the design of algorithms for large swarms of cooperating robots, with particular focus on mobility algorithms. Through this research, biologically inspired coordination strategies have been developed for making robot teams solve problems based solely on local interaction rules. These interaction rules are designed in such a way that global properties emerge in the team in a provable manner. This combination of robotics, biological principles, and control theory, has previously allowed for the development of particular types of algorithms, such as formation control and coverage algorithms. Through the proposed work, they will be taken even further to allow for the development of a novel set of algorithms for the creation of programmable, customizable interaction behaviors, and consequently, the development of robots that can interact with each other through such behaviors.
This I-Corps commercialization project investigated the commercial viability of the swarm robotics technology developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The outcomes of the project were the development of a business model as well as the testing of the model through extensive customer discovery interviews. After multiple iterations and pivots, the final, viable business model was a collection of software tools for designing, monitoring, and interfacing with large-scale teams of autonomous robots using proprietary human-robot interaction technologies. The primary application of the tools is a single user configuring coordination of multiple robots to achieve a common goal. These tools are currently being commercialized through a start-up venture focusing on precision agriculture. In precision agriculture, the ambition is to be able to tend to individual plants as opposed to the broad stroked approach is currently pursued, with the result that water, fertilizer, and pesticide usage is reduced while increasing the yield. In fact, increased autonomy has emerged as a long-term strategy, and this project’s niche is for the "farmer" to be able to act as an operator that can rapidly interact with, deploy, and script appropriate, coordinated, autonomous multi-vehcile patterns. The developed tools are also of relevance in other application domains, such as environmental monitoring, manufacturing, and warehousing, where coordinated coverage, transportation, and material handling patterns are useful.
