Mobile Robot Laboratory Research Projects


Multiagent Robotic Systems


Project Director

Dr. Ronald C. Arkin.


Graduate Students

Doug Mackenzie
Tucker Balch
Khaled Ali


Funding

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


Project Descriptions:


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.


DARPA 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 have been developed and are embodied in the MissionLab software system. This research is related to the DARPA effort in the UGV Demo II project. Additionally research in Robot Formations has also been conducted and demonstrated on two HMMWVs at DARPA'ds Demo C.


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.


Learning Teams
This research concerns learning in multi-robot teams. It is focused on finding which conditions lead to diversity in a learning team and measuring it. Several tasks for teams including formation, foraging and soccer will be investigated. Soccer, the first of these examined so far, is interesting because most people are familiar with the game and with the various specialized roles human players serve on a team.


Multiagent Publications

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