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Robot Hardware Group
The goal of our group is to develop a fleet of robots to
test ideas in the fields of automotive control (intelligent
cruise control), formation control, and control of large groups
of heterogeneous vehicles.
We are, now, focusing on developing one robot moving autonomously,
and, furthermore, to build one or two identical replicas.
Developing a flexible, controllable robot, we can have a great
opportunity for variety of control study. In addition, we
have a plan to acquire a positioning system. We want the robots
in the fleet to be able to communicate information to each
other. Moreover, we are working to design a web-based interface
to control and command the robots, and replay missions.
Team Control and GUI Group
We intend to outline the organization and communication formalisms
for autonomous groups of robots. We consider the general case
of a bottom-up approach towards robot group composition –
configuring our solution to utilize present resources rather
than dictate specifications for resources that need to be
fabricated. Our goal is to move towards simulation and then
implement our organization on our robots in the lab. We are
also in charge of designing an interface for and operator
that effectively and concisely displays the large amount of
information associated with large robot groups. Lastly we
build and customize a replay tool for our simulations and
real-robot trials for post-testing analysis.
Safe Controller Design
Nowadays, unmanned vehicles are becoming part of operations
in scientific and commercial applications. Safety guarantees
turn to be of paramount importance during the trend.
The goal of this project is to develop safe controllers in
the fields of automotive control (intelligent cruise control),
formation control, and control of large groups of heterogeneous
vehicles. Any control strategy could be applied for desired
performance until the state reaches the boundary of the safe
set, when the safe controller works for vehicle safety. The
characterization of the safe sets is developed with mathematical
derivative, and then numerical simulations and physical experiments
on the robot test-bed are employed to validate the safe controllers.
Formation Flight Control Group
Our focus is to study
control techniques, role assignment and trajectory planning
that allow us to move formations of unmanned vehicles in a
coordinated way. In particular, we can create and control
a flight formation for unmanned air vehicles (UAV's). Applications
of interest are for airplane formation flight, satellite interferometry,
and detection of sources of contaminants. The order of
complexity of these systems increases with the number of objects/vehicles
being controlled, extension into three-dimensional space,
as well as an inclusion of system disturbances such as wind. Currently
we have a mathematical model in place for two-dimensional
control of unmanned vehicles, which will be tested with ground
robots. Another application of interest is intelligent
highway systems, where vehicles can move in a specified formation
and adjust accordingly given a change in velocity of the vehicle's
surrounding neighbors.
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