The Robotarium: Globally Impactful Opportunities, Challenges, and Lessons Learned in Remote-Access, Distributed Control of Multirobot Systems

Distributed control has emerged as a major focus in the systems and controls area, with multiagent robotics playing a prominent role both as a canonical instantiation of a system, where control decisions must be made by individual nodes across an information-exchange network, and as a rich source of applications [1]-[5]. These applications include environmental monitoring [6], collective materials handling [7], construction [8], disaster response [9], and precision agriculture [10].

[1]  Keqiang Li,et al.  Distributed Adaptive Sliding Mode Control of Vehicular Platoon With Uncertain Interaction Topology , 2018, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics.

[2]  Mitio Nagumo Über die Lage der Integralkurven gewöhnlicher Differentialgleichungen , 1942 .

[3]  Olivier Michel,et al.  Cyberbotics Ltd. Webots™: Professional Mobile Robot Simulation , 2004, ArXiv.

[4]  H. Brezis On a characterization of flow-invariant sets , 1970 .

[5]  Joris IJsselmuiden,et al.  Monitoring and mapping with robot swarms for agricultural applications , 2017, 2017 14th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Video and Signal Based Surveillance (AVSS).

[6]  Aaron D. Ames,et al.  Safety Barrier Certificates for Collisions-Free Multirobot Systems , 2017, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[7]  Magnus Egerstedt,et al.  The GRITSBot in its natural habitat - A multi-robot testbed , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[8]  Paulo Tabuada,et al.  Robustness of Control Barrier Functions for Safety Critical Control , 2016, ADHS.

[9]  Sonia Martínez,et al.  Coverage control for mobile sensing networks , 2002, IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation.

[10]  Jonathan P. How,et al.  Duckietown: An open, inexpensive and flexible platform for autonomy education and research , 2017, 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[11]  Meng Wang,et al.  Cooperative Car-Following Control: Distributed Algorithm and Impact on Moving Jam Features , 2016, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

[12]  Antonio Bicchi,et al.  Closed-loop steering for unicycle-like vehicles: A simple lyapunov like approach , 1994 .

[13]  Lino Marques,et al.  Robots for Environmental Monitoring: Significant Advancements and Applications , 2012, IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine.

[14]  Francesco Mondada,et al.  Are Autonomous Mobile Robots Able to Take Over Construction? A Review , 2015 .

[15]  Spring Berman,et al.  Pheeno, A Versatile Swarm Robotic Research and Education Platform , 2016, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

[16]  Sing Kiong Nguang,et al.  Distributed Control of Large-Scale Networked Control Systems With Communication Constraints and Topology Switching , 2017, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems.

[17]  Ricardo A. Téllez,et al.  A Thousand Robots for Each Student: Using Cloud Robot Simulations to Teach Robotics , 2016, RiE.

[18]  M. Hilstad,et al.  The SPHERES Guest Scientist Program: collaborative science on the ISS , 2004, 2004 IEEE Aerospace Conference Proceedings (IEEE Cat. No.04TH8720).

[19]  James McLurkin,et al.  Distributed centroid estimation and motion controllers for collective transport by multi-robot systems , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[20]  Spring Berman,et al.  Optimal control of stochastic coverage strategies for robotic swarms , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[21]  David W. Miller,et al.  SPHERES flight operations testing and execution , 2009 .

[22]  Li Wang,et al.  The Robotarium: A remotely accessible swarm robotics research testbed , 2016, 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[23]  Mac Schwager,et al.  Distributed Deep Reinforcement Learning for Fighting Forest Fires with a Network of Aerial Robots , 2018, 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).

[24]  Hyo-Sung Ahn,et al.  A survey of multi-agent formation control , 2015, Autom..

[25]  Gustavo A. Cardona,et al.  Robot Swarms Theory Applicable to Seek and Rescue Operation , 2019, ISDA.

[26]  Radhika Nagpal,et al.  Kilobot: A low cost scalable robot system for collective behaviors , 2012, 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[27]  Olivier Michel,et al.  Cyberbotics Ltd. Webots™: Professional Mobile Robot Simulation , 2004 .

[28]  Petter Nilsson,et al.  Synchronous and asynchronous multi-agent coordination with cLTL+ constraints , 2017, 2017 IEEE 56th Annual Conference on Decision and Control (CDC).

[29]  Nobuto Matsuhira,et al.  Virtual Robot Experimentation Platform V-REP: A Versatile 3D Robot Simulator , 2010, SIMPAR.

[30]  Ramviyas Parasuraman,et al.  Multipoint Rendezvous in Multirobot Systems , 2020, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics.

[31]  Magnus Egerstedt,et al.  Graph Theoretic Methods in Multiagent Networks , 2010, Princeton Series in Applied Mathematics.

[32]  Paulo Tabuada,et al.  Control barrier function based quadratic programs with application to adaptive cruise control , 2014, 53rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.

[33]  Li Wang,et al.  Control Barrier Certificates for Safe Swarm Behavior , 2015, ADHS.