Title:  Coverage Control: From Heterogeneous Robot Teams to Expressive Swarms

Committee: 

Dr. Egerstedt, Advisor   

Dr. Hutchinson, Chair

Dr. Howard

Abstract:

The objective of the proposed research is to investigate two different aspects of the coverage problem, which constitutes a multi-robot coordination strategy that allows a collection of robots to distribute themselves over a domain to optimally monitor its relevant features. On the one hand, the proposed research investigates how heterogeneity can be incorporated in the problem formulation to reflect qualitatively different sensing modalities among the robots. To this end, two different control laws, based on different information exchange strategies among the robots in the team, are presented, and their performance is compared through a series of experiments on a team of mobile robots. On the other hand, along with other standard swarm robotics algorithms, coverage control is explored in this research as a human-swarm interaction modality for the generation of expressive swarm behaviors to be used in artistic expositions. In particular, we study how to incorporate shape and motion descriptors from social psychology into the design of different swarm behaviors, and evaluate their expressiveness in a user study.