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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Title: Coverage Control: From Heterogeneous Robot Teams to Expressive Swarms
Committee:
Dr. Egerstedt, Advisor
Dr. Hutchinson, Chair
Dr. Howard
Abstract:
The objective of the proposed research is to investigate two different aspects of the coverage problem, which constitutes a multi-robot coordination strategy that allows a collection of robots to distribute themselves over a domain to optimally monitor its relevant features. On the one hand, the proposed research investigates how heterogeneity can be incorporated in the problem formulation to reflect qualitatively different sensing modalities among the robots. To this end, two different control laws, based on different information exchange strategies among the robots in the team, are presented, and their performance is compared through a series of experiments on a team of mobile robots. On the other hand, along with other standard swarm robotics algorithms, coverage control is explored in this research as a human-swarm interaction modality for the generation of expressive swarm behaviors to be used in artistic expositions. In particular, we study how to incorporate shape and motion descriptors from social psychology into the design of different swarm behaviors, and evaluate their expressiveness in a user study.
