Project Title
Design and Development of an Efficient Framework for Decentralized Real-Time Coordination and Collaboration for a Swarm of Autonomous Robots
Funding Agency
Core Research Grant (CRG), Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), Department of Science and Technology (DST), Govt. of India
Duration
3 years
Open Position
There is one JRF position under this project. There will be opportunity to enrol for PhD at CSE, at IIT Bhubaneswar.
If interested, please drop a mail to sudipta@iitbbs.ac.in
Please share this information with interested candidates
Brief about the Project
Multi-Robot systems are gaining quite good focus in research and development due to significant scope of its applicability in various domains, for example, in disaster-management, precision-agriculture, conveyance of medical help in emergency situation, and several others. In each of these broad domains, a system comprised of multiple robots is highly essential especially for those jobs which cannot be accomplished within specified deadlines using only a single robot. As per the literature, most of the works on multi-robot systems have been carried out in a purely centralized-platform, e.g., in a lab-setting, where the robots are provided with their short term targets periodically from a powerful central-machine/cloud which already has a global view of the entire area of operation. Unfortunately such infrastructural supports cannot be made available in most of the practical applications of multi-robot systems, e.g., in war-field, disastrous situations etc. Therefore, to make a multi-robot system seamlessly work in any possible practical setting what is essential is an framework where they can efficiently talk, collaborate and coordinate with each other in a purely distributed fashion without support from any specific infrastructure or any central-coordination.
Distributed Multi-Robot System: Challenge
For a set of robots to successfully execute a task together in real time, arriving at a consensus among the robots on various issues is one of the frequent requirements. However, to accomplish the same the first essential task is enabling the robots to efficiently talk to each other, and exchange the necessary information. Since there is no explicit infrastructure, all these operations are supposed to happen through a wireless communication network formed among the robots in an ad hoc basis. Unfortunately end-to-end communication and data-sharing through wireless ad hoc network can be highly inefficient due to several possible reasons. In particular, the process may involve high delay, uncertainty as well as quickly drain the limited energy source of the robots. This in turn severely affects the formation of consensus among the robots. Such issues not only make the realization of a distributed multi-robot system quite challenging but also heavily limits the horizon of it’s possible applications.
Solution Approach
There has been extensive development in the field of Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). A plethora of protocols have been developed for the low-power IoT/WSN devices to talk to each other and efficiently realize various different patterns of communication. These protocols are quite lightweight, low-computation as well as highly optimised in terms of energy consumption too. In addition, in DSSRG we are working in this domain for last several years and we have designed and developed specialised protocol that can support a large number of IoT/WSN devices spread over a wide area. In this project we aim to use and appropriately customize these protocols for efficient and smart collaboration and coordination among multiple-robots.
Main Objectives of the Projects
The overall aim of this project are as follows -
Building flocks of tiny/medium sized robots (Drones / Two-wheel drives)
Design and development of IoT/WSN assisted distributed framework for multi-robot collaboration
Design and development of efficient multi-robot task allocation strategies
Building specialized applications
We are looking for suitable candidate to work as a full time JRF (Junior Research Fellow) in this project.