Sample Past Projects

The project addresses fundamental research to develop novel autonomous and adaptive monitoring systems for natural resources across large spatio-temporal scales using networks of aerial robots equipped with visual sensors. The robots will be able to autonomously adapt to the observed phenomena and to multiple, often conflicting, time-varying constraints and mission specifications, greatly improving the precision of the collected data, and allowing spatio-temporal scalability. This is achieved by considering tradeoffs between visual sensing, real-time trajectory planning, decision making, and system optimization.

Key research topics addressed by ARCS:

• Multi-robot information gathering

• Multi-agent decision making

• Field testing and evaluation

This project investigates the mechanisms that uncertainties in robot-environment interactions affect (small) robot behavior. Small robot motion is more stochastic since errors at the actuators and uncertain interactions with the environment amplify errors in pose. The goal is to introduce a platform-agnostic, data-driven modeling framework to quantify uncertainty and subsequently exploit it via control for reliable robot navigation under uncertainty. The specific aims are to: 1) extract dynamics using limited data for modeling uncertain systems; 2) synthesize uncertainty-aware model-based controllers based on derived reduced-order models; and 3) test and validate theoretical analysis and derived models and control algorithms with aerial, ground, and marine robots. Spectral methods are used to extract spatio-temporal dynamics and to quantify uncertainty. A model-reference adaptive control scheme utilizes extracted dynamics and uncertainty for reliable robot navigation. While the basic principles developed in this research are grounded on small robots, this project's findings may generalize to larger robots with limited sensing and noisy actuation.