Murphey:Cooperative Control and Cooperative Manipulation

Purpose

Cooperative Control Detection of Anomolies

To investigate systems in which a set of agents must complete a task given a minimal amount of information in the presence of uncertainty and the need for robust cooperation.
One of our interests is in the use of "simple" controllers--controllers that are ideally linear and amenable to robustness analysis using quadratic Lyapunov functions $V_{G(q,\dot{q})}$ that vary discretely with the varying network topology $G(q,\dot{q})$ . One of our main results so far is that global stability can be achieved using linear controllers if commands based on the network topology are modified properly.
Applications include coordinated manipulation and cooperation using sparse networks.
An illustration of our work is in the picture to the right. The red areas are diffuse targets (e.g., a chemical plume released into the air) that we would like to track with the robots. This relies on local interactions only, and uses a much simpler control strategly than commonly employed.

Embedded System controls the Roomba

Roomba with Embedded ARM testbed

To provide a testbed for our cooperative control experiments, we have chosen to use IRobot Roombas. These autonomous robots are both cheap and have an open standard that may be 'hacked' to control the Roombas. This has allowed us to create versatile agents with complete access to the functions that the Roombas provide.
In order for the Roombas to be autonomously, we have deployed the TS-7260 Embedded ARM System. This is a low-power board that has a 200Mhz ARM processor, two USB drives, 32 MB on board memory, and an SD expansion socket. We have configured a complete Linux installation on the board through a 1 GB SD Card, which has allowed us to run a Java VM that executes our experiments. As well, we have installed a USB WiFi adapter in order that we may control the Roombas wirelessly, as well as have the Roombas communicate efficiently and effectively.

This project is in its initial stages and thus many of the projects revolve around building up the functionality of the Roombas and ensuring their stability for future experiments. Nonetheless, our testbed has shown itself to be effective and the results of these experiments are worth a degree of attention.

Fault Tolerance Experiment	Tracking an Invading Agent	Telemetry Data for Tracking an Invading Agent
Description of Fault Tolerance Experiment	Description of Tracking Movie	Description of Telemetry Data