Ongoing Research
Toward Expendable Robot Teaming in Extreme Environments
Expendable robot teaming refers to a team composed of robots of different size (e.g., tiny, small, medium, large), locomotion systems (e.g., tracked, wheeled, legged, flying, underwater), sensors, electronics, power systems, payload and price, some of which can be left on-site in case of fault or contamination, without the need to be retrieved or repaired and without representing a significant loss in terms of cost of the technology and of the disposal process. Such a feature depends upon the relations which can be established between the different characteristics of the robots of the team and the degree of complexity, dimension, type, accessibility, reachability and the expected level of radioactivity of the different areas of a nuclear site. Moreover, by means of their design in term of both size and mobility, these robots have the characteristic that some of them can be carried or lifted by others
Parent-child multi-robot group coalition in constrained-space environments
Parent-child group coalition refers to the ability of groups of robots to cooperatively plan and control their motions to establish configurations in the environment where the locomotion capabilities of every single robot of the group are interleaved to accomplish the task at hand. It can be divided in three main phases: approach, symbiosis and release. In the approach phase the parent and the child robots collaborate to reach an intermediate configuration where the symbiosis can take place. During the symbiosis the robots reconfigure themselves based on the type of locomotion capability which is best suited for the navigation task. Finally, in the release phase, the child robot detaches itself from the parent and accomplishes the final objective of the overall task. Typical examples of this paradigm are configurations where (i) a medium-size tracked robot (parent) transports a small wheeled robot (child) up to the entrance of a narrow tunnel on the top of a staircase or (ii) two aerial vehicles (parents) bring a crawling robot (child) to the entrance of a pipe in the middle of a cooling tower (related to PROJ324: Individual Projects. More info here).