Title:  Barrier Certificates for Coordinated Teams of Robots

Committee: 

Dr. Egerstedt, Advisor

Dr. Vela, Chair

Dr. Wardi

Abstract:

The objective of the proposed research is to design barrier certificates that provably ensure correct composition of multiple objectives for coordinated teams of robots. The non-negotiable objectives for the team, such as collision avoidance and connectivity maintenance, will always be satisfied. Meanwhile, the negotiable higher level objective, such as covering an area and maintaining a formation, will be respected as much as possible. These requirements are handled with a real-time optimization-based algorithm, which results in a minimally-invasive safety enforcement strategy. The proposed barrier certificates are validated with experiments for coordinated teams of ground mobile robots and quadrotors.