Research Lead/s :
Prof. Robert Fitch
The future of robotics is in teams of robots that can work together to achieve a shared goal. For example, in a disaster relief scenario searching for trapped survivors, a team of robots can search an area much faster and more reliably than a single robot can. If one member of the team gets stuck, or suffers a communications failure, the rest of the team can continue searching while the disabled robot gets back online.
To realize this capability, we need the robots to be capable of cooperating and managing tasks between themselves. One way to do that is to have a “leader” robot that tells each team member what to do. This can work well in safe environments with reliable communications, but in dangerous situations with unreliable communications, this is a risky approach. If the leader robot loses communications or is disabled, the whole team stops.
In contrast, our work is on researching decentralised, or “leaderless” cooperation algorithms for teams of robots, in which team members decide among themselves what to do next. The removal of the “leader” role means that the failure of any member of the team will not stop the rest of the team from continuing to perform the task. Remarkably, our decentralised algorithms still maintain the same optimality guarantees as the case with a single leader, meaning that the team’s performance of the task is maintained. This work has applications in not only in humanitarian aid and disaster relief, but other search-and-rescue situations and also military scenarios. This work is a collaboration with several partners, including the DSTG. Our work in this area has been recognised with a Best Poster Award at the ICRA 2021 workshop “Robotic Swarms for the Real World”.
Research Team : Felix Kong, Chanyeol Yoo, Brian Lee, Cadmus To, Fred Sukkar & Jennifer Wakulicz
Research Strength : Sensing, perception and estimation, Control, planning and coordination, Platforms
