Robot Platform

Besides fundamental theory development, a multi-robot testbed consisting of both autonomous unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) and aerial vehicles (UAV), together with a 24-camera OptiTrack motion capture system that provides indoor localization information, has been developed in the DISCOVER Lab located at B29 Fitzpatrick Engineering Hall. 

The UGV components consists of six ActivMedia Pioneer robots that use acoustic proximity sensors for collision avoidance, and combination of gyro-corrected wheel encoders and Laser Rangefinder for localization and environment map building. The robots are equipped with 2-DOF Gripper with grasping pressure sensor, and are controlled through an on-board PC that communicates to each other over an 802.11 wireless LAN card. 

The UAV component consists of three quadrotors from Unmanned Dynamics, which are equipped with micro controllers, analog 9-degree IMU, pressure sensor and onboard GPS module. To make these UAVs suitable for our research tasks, significant upgrades on their on-board sensing and processing capabilities have been conducted in my lab with the addition of wireless communication modules, upper-level processing board, on-board camera and vision processing.  

Through the multi-robot/UAV testbed, prototype applications, such as  coordinated pollution detection and containment, will be implemented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed design methods. Compared with many existing multi-robot testbeds, our testbed has its distinctive features in the emphasis on cooperative tasking in uncertain environments, implementations based on correct-by-construction formal methods and automatic reconfiguration for tasks on-the-fly.