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Egerstedt, Magnus B.

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    Multi-robot platooning in hostile environments
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2012-04-09) Shively, Jeremy
    The purpose of this thesis is to develop a testing environment for mobile robot experiments, to examine methods for multi-robot platooning through hostile environments, and test these algorithms on mobile robots. Such a system will allow us to rapidly address and test problems that arise concerning robot swarms and consequent interactions. In order to create this hardware simulation environment a test bed will be created using ROS or Robot Operating System. This platform is highly modular and extensible for future development. Trajectory generation for the robots will use smoothing splines, B-splines, and A* search. Each method has distinct properties which will be analyzed and rated with respect to its effectiveness with regards to robotic platooning. A few issues to be considered include: Is the optimal path taken with respect to distance and threats? Is the formation of the robots maintained or compromised during traversal of the path? And finally, what sorts of compromises or additions are needed to make each method effective? This work will be helpful for choosing route planning methods in future work and will provide a large code base for rapid prototyping.
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    Generation and use of a discrete robotic controls alphabet for high-level tasks
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2012-04-06) Gargas , Eugene Frank, III
    The objective of this thesis is to generate a discrete alphabet of low-level robotic controllers rich enough to mimic the actions of high-level users using the robot for a specific task. This alphabet will be built through the analysis of various user data sets in a modified version of the motion description language, MDLe. It can then be used to mimic the actions of a future user attempting to perform the task by calling scaled versions of the controls in the alphabet, potentially reducing the amount of data required to be transmitted to the robot, with minimal error. In this thesis, theory is developed that will allow the construction of such an alphabet, as well as its use to mimic new actions. A MATLAB algorithm is then built to implement the theory. This is followed by an experiment in which various users drive a Khepera robot through different courses with a joystick. The thesis concludes by presenting results which suggest that a relatively small group of users can generate an alphabet capable of mimicking the actions of other users, while drastically reducing bandwidth.
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    3D reconfiguration using graph grammars for modular robotics
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2011-12-16) Pickem, Daniel
    The objective of this thesis is to develop a method for the reconfiguration of three-dimensional modular robots. A modular robot is composed of simple individual building blocks or modules. Each of these modules needs to be controlled and actuated individually in order to make the robot perform useful tasks. The presented method allows us to reconfigure arbitrary initial configurations of modules into any pre-specified target configuration by using graph grammar rules that rely on local information only. Local in a sense that each module needs just information from neighboring modules in order to decide its next reconfiguration step. The advantage of this approach is that the modules do not need global knowledge about the whole configuration. We propose a two stage reconfiguration process composed of a centralized planning stage and a decentralized, rule-based reconfiguration stage. In the first stage, paths are planned for each module and then rewritten into a ruleset, also called a graph grammar. Global knowledge about the configuration is available to the planner. In stage two, these rules are applied in a decentralized fashion by each node individually and with local knowledge only. Each module can check the ruleset for applicable rules in parallel. This approach has been implemented in Matlab and currently, we are able to generate rulesets for arbitrary homogeneous input configurations.
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    Multi-robot assignment and formation control
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2011-07-08) Macdonald, Edward A.
    Our research focuses on one of the more fundamental issues in multi-agent, mobile robotics: the formation control problem. The idea is to create controllers that cause robots to move into a predefined formation shape. This is a well studied problem for the scenario in which the robots know in advance to which point in the formation they are assigned. In our case, we assume this information is not given in advance, but must be determined dynamically. This thesis presents an algorithm that can be used by a network of mobile robots to simultaneously determine efficient robot assignments and formation pose for rotationally and translationally invariant formations. This allows simultaneous role assignment and formation sysnthesis without the need for additional control laws. The thesis begins by introducing some general concepts regarding multi-agent robotics. Next, previous work and background information specific to the formation control and assignment problems are reviewed. Then the proposed assignment al- gorithm for role assignment and formation control is introduced and its theoretical properties are examined. This is followed by a discussion of simulation results. Lastly, experimental results are presented based on the implementation of the assignment al- gorithm on actual robots.