Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

Autonomous systems are witnessing exponential growth in acceptance and recognition from governments, agencies and the population at large and over the last decade. While scientific advances have been made in many subfields, none is more prominent than the automatization of mobile vehicles. The cornerstone of any modern autonomous systems research is the ability to accurately localize and quickly track the motion of mobile agents. The newly created Instrumentation and Autonomous Agents facility at the University of Ottawa will support interdisciplinary research to expand the capabilities of autonomous systems by uniting expertise from the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The motion capture system combined with a fleet of intelligent autonomous robotic agents will lead to new discoveries in autonomous system algorithms, cooperative control and coordination systems, and localization and sensing approaches. The sensing tools will facilitate the implementation and performance assessment of vehicle designs recently developed by the applicants' groups and foster new advances in the fields of bio-inspired perception mechanisms, drone deliveries, aerial deployments, heterogeneous multi-agent task allocation and control. The motion capture system and agents acquired through this proposal will play a vital role for performing multi-disciplinary collaborative experimental research and instilling marketable technological skills to future generations of engineers and scientists in the fields of robotics, autonomous vehicles, teleoperation, and human-robot interactions.