Introduction

Cooperative control deals with the problem of controlling a multi-agent robotic system to fulfill a common goal. The tasks associated with these robotic systems include search, exploration, surveillance, rescue operations and mapping unknown or partially known environments. In real-world applications, the control of multiple robots is often complicated by the following factors

• Resource constraints on sensing, motion and communication capabilities, on-board computation capacities, and power supplies
• Unknow, uncertain nature of the environments requires robotic systems to be adaptive to environmental changes, accurate in information acquisition, prompt and smart in decision making
• Distributed, asynchronous information and computation structures are inherent due to the geographical separation and communication constrains

Goals

We are interested in the decision making process in cooperative control applications. We currently concentrate on the cooperative mission control of multiple Uninhabitated Autonomous Vehicles (UAVs) in a battlefield environment. The main objectives include developing the methodology and software that enable

• Dynamic task assignment
• Vehicle routing and obstacle-free path planning
• Distributed and real-time decision making
• Optimal trajectory generation under nonholonomic constraints

Robot Platform

The multiple autonomous robot platform physically locates at the Intelligent Mechatronics Laboratory. Main components of this platform are

20 Khepera II miniature robots with 25MHz micro-processor, 8 on board IR sensors and RF wireless communication turrets Additional Khepera add-ins include video turrets and grippers An overhead vision system consists of PULNiX TMC1000 digital video camera and National Instruments IMAQ 1426 vision capture card National Instruments Labview and LabWindows 2 Dell workstations

Main objectives of this multi-robot platform includes the implementation and performance evaluation of current theoretical results on the cooperative mission control of multiple UAVs. During which, special concentration is made on the architecture of real-time control system, the multi-robot motion control over delayed wireless communication network, the location detection and estimation mechanism, and robot motion control based on both planning path and on-board sensing data.

Publications

Click here for full publication and presentation list

Multimedia

Pictures	Video clips
Multi-robot test bed (8'*8')	Obstacle Avoidance w/Sensor Network (Nov. 2005, WMV)
Over-head vision system	UAV Cooperative Control (June, WMV)
Khepera robots 1	UAV Cooperative Control (Apr,WMV)
Khepera robots 2	UAV Cooperative Control (Apr,MPG)
Working scene 1	IML Small Robot Testbed (Mar 23, 2005)
Working scene 2	Obstacle Avoidance (May 6, 2005)
	Obstacle Avoidance (May 6, 2005)

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