Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Future civilian and military rescue missions will rely on large, networked groups of small vehicles and sensors operating in dynamic, resource-constrained, adversarial environments. Groups of this type will typically operate with little or no direct human supervision and will be very difficult, if not impossible, to efficiently manage or control by programming or by tele-operation. Management of such large groups will thus be extremely challenging and will require integration of communication, control, computation and sensing, specifically tailored to the command and control of large-scale, autonomously functioning vehicle groups. To address these challenges, we propose to embark on a broadly-based, cross-disciplinary research program in which we will develop and study networked groups of autonomous agents. Our goal is to develop a minimum-time reconfiguration problem which is a matter of grave importance in rescue missions. It is also desired to develop scalable, provably correct protocols for vision-based distributed coordination of networked group of autonomous agents and cooperative robots. One of the applications of the proposed research is in coordinated disaster relief operation after a natural catastrophe or terrorist attack, by providing a temporary communication network. Another civilian application is in mining industry, where a group of semi-autonomous mobile equipment in a mining environment work collaboratively to achieve a desirable goal without compromising human safety.