Research Topics

One key enabler of Multi-Robot Systems (MRS) is each robots’ ability to share information with other robots within its communication range. This materializes as a communication network that enables cooperation within MRS to pursue a desired collective behavior via a given cooperative control framework. This research topic focus on how to optimize the network topology of MRS’s communication network, emphasizing on resilience and privacy preservation.

Traditionally, augmenting additional objectives and constraint commonly requires a redesign of the existing cooperative control framework. Recently, an emerging approach via control barrier function (CBF) allows a more streamlined way to incorporate multiple objectives and safety requirements as constraints within an optimization problem. This research topic focus on how to guarantee safety deployment of MRS under multiple objectives within an unstructured environment.

The deployment of a group of robots equipped with sensors for monitoring, also known as a robotic sensor network, is a promising technological solution to solve time-critical societal and environmental issues. This research topic focus on how to deploy a robotic sensor network to persistently and effectively monitor multiple locations of interest in a large field represented by grids.

The cooperation between Multi Robot System (MRS) and human operator is capable of alleviating existing limitation on the MRS’s autonomy, e.g., the human operator can help to provide an alternative in the case of deadlock where the only feasible solution is to do nothing. To promote scalability and reduce the human’s workload, it is desirable for the operator to control only a small set of the robots or provide only a high-level command. This research topic focus on how to improve Human-MRS interaction with emphasis on trust, transparency, and minimizing human workload.