Some issues and applications of multi-robot cooperation

摘要

Summary form only given. There are many applications of multi-robot cooperation. They include factory floor, emergency response and rescue, homecare, natural resource monitoring, and outdoor industrial operations such as fault diagnosis and repair. This talk will address several relevant issues in such applications of cooperative robotics, particularly: sensing and instrumentation, control, and networked operation. Two specific domains of application will be given primary focus. They are outdoor emergency response and homecare robotics.The talk will particularly highlight key technologies of sensing, instrumentation, object identification and localization, detection and evaluation of abnormal motions in humans, robotic navigation in the presence of static and dynamic obstacles, grasping and manipulation, networked intelligent sensor fusion and feedback, impedance control in haptic teleoperation, and stable operation, which are pertinent in both application domains. An integrated intelligent approach may be used for the coordinated operation and control of a multi-robot system. In particular, a common system architecture with optimally self-adaptive, intelligent, and dynamic agent network may be implemented for multiple engineering applications. This is an innovative paradigm. The operation of the networked multi-robot system may be optimized by sharing resources among the applications. Dynamic/mobile sensors will receive “feedback” from themselves, to improve their sensing effectiveness (e.g., data/information quality, relevance of their data, speed, confidence). The networked agents will possess some degree of “intelligence” to facilitate autonomous operation and to achieve the desired performance. The system will be able to predict, detect, and diagnose malfunctions and faults in it and accommodate or self-repair them.