Title:  Collaborative Control Strategies for Multi-Robot Teams with Heterogeneous Mobility Characteristics

Committee: 

Dr. Coogan, Advisor   

Dr. Egerstedt, Co-Advisor  

Dr. Wardi, Chair

Dr. Fumin Zhang

Abstract: The objective of the proposed research is to develop control strategies that allow a team of robots with heterogeneous mobility characteristics to collaboratively achieve team-level tasks. In the preliminary work, we focus on utilizing heterogeneous mobility characteristics of robots for coverage control problems. We present a coverage control algorithm that leverages different maximum speeds of robots to obtain a temporally optimal coverage over a domain. Also, we present a coverage control algorithm that allows a team of robots with different mobility-based operating regions to perform a safe coverage where each robot remains in its compatible operating regions. In the proposed work, we aim to investigate coverage control algorithms for robots under changing environmental conditions that affect the mobility characteristics of the robots. In addition, we propose to study inter-robot collaboration strategies that utilize active collaborations between robots in coverage control and broader multi-robot scenarios.