Mobile Robot Laboratory Research Projects

Multiagent Robotic Systems


Project Director

Dr. Ronald C. Arkin.

Research Scientist

Dr. Jonathan Cameron.

Graduate Students

Doug Mackenzie
Tucker Balch
Khaled Ali

Funding

NSF Grant IRI-9100149, ARPA/ONR and the CIMS/AT&T Intelligent Mechatronics Laboroatory.

Description

Research in Robot Formations

NSF Project
Design criteria have been developed for multiagent reactive robotic systems for a variety of tasks. In particular, various communication methods and social organizations were studied and quantitatively evaluated. The environments are assumed to be at best only partially known. Researchers on this project: Ronald C. Arkin. and Tucker Balch

ARPA Project
Multiagent task-achieving behavior is being studied in the context of hostile environments. Teleautonomous control of robot societies is also being evaluated as well as various formation control techniques. Formal methods for expressing teams of robots are being developed. This research is related to the ongoing ARPA effort in the UGV Demo II project.

CIMS/AT&T Project
A multi-disciplinary group of students and researchers designed and built a three robot team of foraging robots. The robots competed in and won the ``Clean Up the Office'' event at the 1994 AAAI robot competition. A reactive strategy for multiagent cooperation helps the robots search for trash objects, which they grasp and carry to wastebaskets.

Recent Publications

Back to Mobile Robot Laboratory

Some Recent Results In Multiagent Communication:


Simulation runs of robots executing three tasks examined in research at Georgia Tech.
Comparision of performance in simulation (top) and on real robots (bottom) executing multiagent tasks.