There are many applications in which teams of mobile robotics agents can outperform a single agent. Distributed robotics systems also introduce redundancy into an application. If a some number of the agents are disabled or otherwise unable to complete their mission, the remaining agents may still be able to complete the task at hand.
The CyberScout thrust consists of many projects, each of which contribute to the overall vision of developing rapidly deployable, highly distributed collaborative mobile robotics systems that scale well to various problems. A common application theme running through much of the work is that of distributed and collaborative search and surveillance of large, unknown environments. To this end, the projects within CyberScout seek to advance the technology and understanding of:
Projects:
Research on collaborative agents has been dramatically increased within the past decade. Why are so many people interested in this area? If you cannot imagine how the collaboration can be useful, let's think about an ant colony. Each ant has little capability, but when many of them work together, they can do an incredible task such as move a very heavy object. Similarly, if we can arrange several robots to perform some tasks cooperatively, we will achieve the goal more efficiently. But how? This is our research area.
CyberRave is built to support the robot collaboration framework. With CyberRave, each robot can easily communicate with each other. Humans can input the command from remote terminal, then the robot do the task and show the result back to the human. Seems easy? Not really. Many problem arise from this operation which can be classify as below; (all of this are our research topic)
Project Contact: Pradeep K. Khosla
Project Contact: John Dolan
Project Contact: John Dolan
Project Contact: John Dolan
In this reasearch approach we are exploring a hierarchical, distributed, and active perception system. Our final goal is to use this preception system to implement a dynamic surveillance system able to perform tasks such as target recognition, dynamic target tracking, terrain recognition, and autoconfiguration to maximize field coverage.
Project Contact: John Dolan
As one of the multiple platforms within CyberScout, we have developed two unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) (named Lewis and Clark - after the famous explorers) by retrofitting two Polaris all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), automating their throttle, steering, braking and gearing functions and giving them computation for control, navigation, sensing and communication.
Project Contact: John Dolan
CyberRAVE is a general-purpose framework to run and simulate multiple mobile robot systems. It provides a uniform interface for programming robots in a multiple-robot system so that programs may be developed in simulation and transferred to real robots with minimal effort. Real robots and virtual robots can also interact with each other. CyberRAVE's simulation environment provides the capability for virtual sensors that may be placed on real or virtual robots and can detect robots (real and virtual) as well as virtual obstacles. In this manner, multiple-robot systems can be run entirely in simulation, with a combination of real and virtual entities, or with entirely real entities. Graphical user interfaces allow users to set up, execute, monitor, and interact with a run.
Two retrofitted R/C tanks (Patton & Rommel) are currently used to test the CyberRAVE environment. They are equipped with 8 ring sonars, 7 IR obstacle detectors, pan-tilt camera, stereo microphones, and 68HC11 microcontroller + i486 based PC104 for on-board computation and sensor information distribution.
Project Web Site: None Available
Project Contact: Chris Paredis
Gyrover is a single-wheel robot that is stabilized and steered by means of an internal, mechanical gyroscope. Gyrover can stand and turn in place, move deliberately at low speed, climb moderate grades (about 20%), and move stably on rough terrain at high speeds (10 kph or more). It has a relatively large rolling diameter which facilitates motion over rough terrain; a single track and narrow profile for obstacle avoidance; and is completely enclosed for protection from the environment. Gyrover is able to right itself when it falls on its side. With proper design, Gyrover can float and propel itself on water, and may be useful in amphibious operations. The third and latest version is 16" (40 cm) in diameter and weighs 16 pounds (7.3 kg). It carries an onboard computer (486 PC), attitude sensors, videocamera and radio systems for control inputs and video transmission. With appropriate control software, we expect GyroverIII to be able to perform reliable locomotion over a variety of terrains in response to intermittent, high-level commands from a remote operator.
Project Web Site: None Available
Project Contact: Ben Brown
"ICES Cubes" are a class of modular self-reconfigurable bipartite robotic system. This system is a collection of independently controlled mechatronic modules (links) and passive connection elements (cubes). A link has the ability to connect to and disconnect from the face of a cube. While attached to a cube on one end, links are also capable of moving themselves and another cube attached to the other end (see animations on project web site). We envision all active (link) and passive (cube) modules as capable of permitting power and information flow to their neighboring modules.
As the links move (with or without attached cubes), attach, and detach themselves to the cubes, the morphology of the system changes. The three-dimensional oriented network formed by the modules (where the links can be visualized as lines connecting the nodes formed by cubes) break at a point when a link detaches itself from a cube, and a new connection is formed when a link re-attaches to a cube. If a link moves a cube attached to it, the location of the nodes on the network changes. The system described here can therefore dynamically reconfigure itself.
Project Contact: Cem Unsal
Millibots are small semi-autonomous and autonomous robots to be deployed by a larger robot or field agent. We envision a group of robots:
Project Contact: Pradeep Khosla
