The objective of this research is to enable the development of teams of robots, equipped with vision and other sensors, capable of working alongside humans in critical missions, such as search and rescue. Key requirements are situational awareness and coordinated action. The approach is to develop mathematical frameworks and algorithms to enable such a team of robots to coordinate their paths, share and analyze their sensor data, maintain communications, and interact effectively and safely with humans. The project brings together experts in computer vision, robotics, estimation theory and controls.
Intellectual Merit. Realizing the above goals will require advances in several inter-related domains. Specifically, the sensing, estimation, and trajectory control tasks must seamlessly integrate visual analysis with navigation and control strategies, as well as inputs from humans. Novel distributed estimation strategies must be developed to accommodate difficult and dynamic environments. Efficient human-robot coordination necessitates methodologies for joint exploration and mapping, identifying important visual information, and robots? operation at different levels of autonomy.
Broader Impact. The success of this project will be a major step towards the deployment of teams of robots to assist humans in dangerous and complex tasks like disaster response. Search-and-rescue experts will advise the team in developing a prototype system, and evaluating it in situations that mimic operational conditions. The developed software tools will be disseminated to other researchers so they can build on the results. Undergraduates from UCR's highly diverse student population will gain valuable experience working alongside graduate student researchers.
