Title : Distributed Control in Mobile Robotics Systems: theoretical developments and applications

Project Lead : Giuseppe Prencipe From : Univ. di Pisa (None)

Dates : from -- to 2015-02-04 13:07:47

Description :

Motivation and objectives :
In the last decade the study of distributed systems consisting of multiple robots (a.k.a. robot swarms) working together to complete cooperative tasks in a distributed environment has gained much attention, and still is an important, fresh area of research with numerous open problems. Also, several efforts have been taken to theoretically model such systems, in the attempt of understanding their real power, and the capabilities of the team with respect to the power of the single units. Our main goal is to extend the results provided by the theoretical studies, with the support of computer simulations.

Teams :
The Distributed Algorithms Research Group (DARG) is part of the group of Algorithms at the Department of Computer Science of the Universit di Pisa. The Algorithms group includes 4 full professors, 2 tenured researchers, 1 tenure-track researcher, and a number of Ph.D. students. The activities of the Algorithms group span several research topics, such as the design, analysis and experimentation of algorithms and data structures for storing, compressing, mining and retrieving information from large amounts of textual data; dynamic and external memory algorithms; graph algorithms; pattern matching algorithms on strings, matrices and trees; text indexing and compressed data structures; compressed suffix array and suffix tree. Various members of the group are involved in several national and international projects, and received prestigious research achievements, such as the "EATCS Doctoral Dissertation Thesis Award", and have several patents pending. The activities of the DARG started in 1999, and span over several issues related to distributed systems, such as security, fault-tolerant routing, study of mobile agents. Since the beginning, its research activities also focuses on the study of coordination and control issues in a distributed environment populated by a set of autonomous mobile robots.

Dates :
starting date : 03 August, 2014
ending date : 15 August, 2014

Facilities descriptions :
http://visionair-browser.g-scop.grenoble-inp.fr/visionair/Browser/Catalogs/3DICC.HU.html

Recordings & Results :
In the last decade the study of distributed systems consisting of multiple robots (a.k.a. robot swarms) working together to complete cooperative tasks in a distributed environment has gained much attention, and it still is an important, fresh area of research with numerous open problems. Also, several efforts have been taken to theoretically model such systems, in the attempt of understanding their real power, and the capabilities of the team with respect to the power of the single units. Our main goal is to extend the results provided by the theoretical studies, with the support of computer simulations. In particular, we exploited the facilities available at 3DICC labs (MTA SZTAKI, Budapest, Hungary) to augment to potential of our simulator (SYCAMORE), that is being developed at the Department of Computer Science of the Universit degli Studi di Pisa (Italy).

Conclusions :
During the project period, we were able to successfully integrate SYCAMORE with the VirCA platform, by achieving a complete two-way communication between the two systems: 1. The agents simulated in SYCAMORE can be visualized in the 3D virtual environment offered by VirCA. Thus, problems related to collisions can be better visualized, hence more effectively addressed. 2. VirCA is able to communicate to SYCAMORE the position of any external agent that operates in VirCA, that can be thus used in the simulation process of SYCAMORE. As a consequence, SYCAMORE can now also take advantage in the simulations of data coming from any real external controller (such as OculusRift glasses, or Kinect).